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 ...