World-Systems Analysis

Islamism and the New Disintegration of Empires

In this interview, Georgi Derluguian discusses the reasons of Islamism’s popularity in the context of collapse of two great projects of the West — liberalism and communism. He pays special attention to organizational peculiarity of Islam, which allows this religion to lead successful wars against powerful empires. People who find this ideology attractive are not “new barbarians”; on the contrary, we are dealing with modern socially active people, whose access to social lifts has been blocked.