Editorial

Abstract

The issue before you features important studies that offer new ways to understand the modern and exogenous forces, such as territorial nationalism and neoliberalism, that have shaped Muslim societies and Islamic discourses over the last two centuries. Luke Peterson’s “Palestine-Israel and the Neoliberal Ideal” argues for theorizing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict not primarily as a nationalist or cultural conflict, but as a casualty of neoliberalism. Among the chief motivators of the now infamous duplicity of the British in the course of the First World War, Peterson suggests, were the region’s economic benefit and natural resources. Peterson argues – against the conventional understanding of neoliberalism as a largely post-1970s phenomenon that reversed the doctrine of managed capitalism in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War – that British policies even during the First World War can be fruitfully characterized as a kind of neoliberalism ...