Individualism and collectivism

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Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles

The Nature of Prejudice

For many Westerners, ours seems to be the era of the \"Islamic threat, \" with radical Muslims everywhere on the rise and on the march, remaking societies and altering the landscape of contemporary politics. In a powerful corrective to this view, the French political philosopher Olivier Roy presents an entirely different verdict: political Islam is a failure. Even if Islamic fundamentalists take power in countries like Algeria, they will be unable to reshape economics and politics and, in the name of \"Islamic universalism, \" will express no more than nationalism or an even narrower agenda. Despite all the rhetoric about an \"Islamic way, \" an \"Islamic economy, \" and an \"Islamic state, \" the realities of the Muslim world remain essentially unchanged. Roy demonstrates that the Islamism of today is still the Third Worldism of the 1960s: populist politics and mixed economies of laissez-faire for the rich and subsidies for the poor. In Roy's striking formulation, those marching today beneath Islam's green banners are same as the \"reds\" of yesterday, with similarly dim prospects of success. Roy has much to say about the sociology of radical Islam, about the set of ideas and assumptions at its core. He explains lucidly why Iran, for all the sound and fury of its revolution, has been unable to launch \"sister republics\" beyond its borders, and why the dream of establishing Islam as a \"third force\" in international relations remains a futile one. Richly informed, powerfully argued, and clearly written, this is a book that no one trying to understand Islamic fundamentalism can afford to overlook.

The Failure of Political Islam. By Olivier Roy. Translated from French by Carol Volk. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. xi, 238 pp. $22.95.

After the attacks of 9/11 Americans asked, ‘Why do they hate us so much?’ The answer has been framed in terms of a range of ‘clashes’, none of which has addressed emotion, which is at the centre of the question. Emotion, and particularly humiliation, has begun to be addressed within the literature of IR. Numerous scholars have highlighted the pervasiveness of a discourse of humiliation in the Middle East and its relationship to the swelling ranks of recruits who are willing to act as human bombs. The purpose of this article is to examine the emotional dynamics of this relationship. The first section undertakes a conceptual analysis of humiliation and betrayal. The second section explores how these emotions have been given coherent meaning in the narrative of Islamists from the region. This is followed by an historical analysis of how this narrative has provided a framework for giving meaning to a range of national, regional and international interactions, particularly since 1967, and has contributed to the emergence of Islam as the basis for transnational identity in what had become a highly secular region. Section three examines flaws in the logic of both militant Islamists and the US-led ‘War on Terrorism’, arguing that both have exacerbated feelings of humiliation in the region rather than contributing to a restoration of dignity. The conclusion builds on the principle of human dignity to rethink the international approach to political violence.

A Clash of Emotions: The Politics of Humiliation and Political Violence in the Middle East

This study proposes that Islamic militancy, poverty, youth and personality patterns contribute to the explanation of support for Palestinian suicide bombings, as well as proneness to participate in them. Data come from a simple random sample of 342 Palestinian refugees living in southern Lebanon. The administration of the research instrument took place during the summer of 2002. The findings attest to the strength of political Islam, low income, youth and certain social functionality attributes in explaining endorsement of suicide attacks, as well as willingness to take part in them.

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Collective Palestinian frustration and suicide bombings

Lebanese Muslim reactions to the September 11 attacks are assessed using the hypotheses that receptiveness to dogmas of militant Islam and young age would predict approval of the attacks, and education and income, although important in explaining the domestic component of political Islam, would have no bearing on support for the September 11 terrorist attacks. In view of the recent surge of Sunni Muslim militancy, it is proposed that Sunni respondents would show greater support for the attacks than Shi'is. The data were obtained from a stratified random sample consisting of 337 Sunni and Shi'i male and female respondents to an opinion poll conducted in the Greater Beirut area during October and November 2001. The findings verify the proposition that proneness to militant Islam and age predicted approval of the attacks but do not verify the hypothesis that Sunni respondents exceeded Shi'is in approval for the attacks.

Islam and Terrorism: Lebanese Muslim Views on September 11

The rapid dissemination of technology such as the Internet across geographical and ethnic lines is opening up opportunities for computer agents to negotiate with people of diverse cultural and organizational affiliations. To negotiate proficiently with people in different cultures, agents need to be able to adapt to the way behavioral traits of other participants change over time. This article describes a new agent for repeated bilateral negotiation that was designed to model and adapt its behavior to the individual traits exhibited by its negotiation partner. The agent’s decision-making model combined a social utility function that represented the behavioral traits of the other participant, as well as a rule-based mechanism that used the utility function to make decisions in the negotiation process. The agent was deployed in a strategic setting in which both participants needed to complete their individual tasks by reaching agreements and exchanging resources, the number of negotiation rounds was not fixed in advance and agreements were not binding. The agent negotiated with human subjects in the United States and Lebanon in situations that varied the dependency relationships between participants at the onset of negotiation. There was no prior data available about the way people would respond to different negotiation strategies in these two countries. Results showed that the agent was able to adopt a different negotiation strategy to each country. Its average performance across both countries was equal to that of people. However, the agent outperformed people in the United States, because it learned to make offers that were likely to be accepted by people, while being more beneficial to the agent than to people. In contrast, the agent was outperformed by people in Lebanon, because it adopted a high reliability measure which allowed people to take advantage of it. These results provide insight for human-computer agent designers in the types of multicultural settings that we considered, showing that adaptation is a viable approach towards the design of computer agents to negotiate with people when there is no prior data of their behavior.

An Adaptive Agent for Negotiating with People in Different Cultures

Anecdotal evidence abounds that conflicts between two individuals can spread across networks to involve a multitude of others. We advance a cultural transmission model of intergroup conflict where conflict contagion is seen as a consequence of universal human traits (ingroup preference, outgroup hostility; i.e. parochial altruism) which give their strongest expression in particular cultural contexts. Qualitative interviews conducted in the Middle East, USA and Canada suggest that parochial altruism processes vary across cultural groups and are most likely to occur in collectivistic cultural contexts that have high ingroup loyalty. Implications for future neuroscience and computational research needed to understand the emergence of intergroup conflict are discussed.

The cultural contagion of conflict

Inside the Lebanese Confessional Mind is noteworthy in three regards. First, the study applies survey research to the analysis of confessional conflict in Lebanon. As such, it provides empirical data on an issue vital to Lebanon's future as an independent country. Secondly, the data reported in the study are compared to the results of survey research conducted in the years prior to the civil war. In so doing, it places current attitudes toward confessionalism in a longitudinal perspective. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the study integrates its survey data with a vast array of qualitative studies concerning the confessional problem in Lebanon. Survey research is used to augment more traditional modes of scholarship. Contents: The Unmaking of Lebanese Society; The Contours of the Study; The Ecological Profile: Some Relevant Aspects of Differentiation; Internal Group Mechanism; Basic Political Orientations; Functional Requisites of Modern Political Behavior; Determinants of Inter-Group Perceptions; The Second Republic and the Future; Appendices; Bibliography; Index.

Hilal Khashan

Papers

Collective Palestinian frustration and suicide bombings

Islam and Terrorism: Lebanese Muslim Views on September 11

An Adaptive Agent for Negotiating with People in Different Cultures

The cultural contagion of conflict

Inside the Lebanese Confessional Mind