Within the extensive literature on political moderation the impetus for opposition movements to moderate their political behaviour is depicted as being driven by either inclusion into or exclusion from institutional and electoral politics. The result being that two analytical camps have developed that treat the drivers and vagaries of moderation in distinctive and mutually exclusive fashions. While each camp produces cogent and nuanced analyses of the moderation process, the lack of any analytical consensus further complicates our understanding of the moderation process overall, and ultimately precludes the generation of a universally accepted and generalisable theory to account for the progressive moderation of opposition movements. However, this paper seeks to challenge the utility of such an analytical dichotomy. Using the behavioural shifts of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas since 2004 as its case study, this paper demonstrates that the impetus for shifts in Hamas’s political behaviour during this period has come from a combination of both inclusive and exclusive political forces. Analysing primary source documents, leadership statements and interviews, and public polling data this qualitative study demonstrates that from 2004 – 2006 political inclusion was the dominant driving force behind Hamas’s progressive moderation. However, after Hamas’s surprise election victory in 2006, political exclusion became the dominant driving force for Hamas’s continuing moderation after Israel imposed a siege on Gaza designed to exorcise Hamas from Palestinian politics. What the subsequent analysis reveals is that during the inclusion phase Hamas could adopt less ideologically risky policy positions such as forming a political party, publishing an election manifesto, and contesting municipal and parliamentary elections. However, during the post-election exclusion phase, Hamas was forced to adopt more ideologically risky policy positions by making significant ideological compromises on core areas of its raison d’être, namely having to refine its refusal to recognise the Israeli state, re-think its opposition to the two-state solution, and modulate its armed resistance to Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. Overall, the paper highlights the need to closely study the effect(s) of changes in the political environment within which an opposition movement operates and how that movement responds to understand key drivers of the moderation process. Equally, the paper highlights the need to understand how a movement justifies its response to these changes to its constituencies to avoid any internal schism or retreat from the moderation process.

This paper aims to explore the dynamics of Hezbollah’s framing of “resistance” after the outbreak of the Syrian conflict in spring 2011 through quantitative text analysis of Arabic speeches of the secretary-general, Hasan Nasrallah. While Hezbollah repeatedly addresses that “resistance (muqawama)” is their raison d'être, the leadership has been trying to re-define its meaning through various framings, the so-called "resistance society" for example. As the Syrian conflict broke out, Hezbollah started their direct involvement in it and claimed that their resistance mission is to eliminate threats of Syrian jihadists as well as Israeli Zionist to justify their cross-border operations. Thus, Hezbollah’s armed resistance virtually became two-front. This paper is designed to conduct empirical research on the question of how Hezbollah’s discourse of the two-front resistance emerged and changed between the pre- and post-Syrian conflict periods. Most of the existing studies on Nasrallah’s speeches employed qualitative analyses, which is not able to seize the overall trend of Hezbollah's discourse dynamics. And also these studies tend to use English translations of the original Arabic speeches, raising questions of analytical accuracy. Taking them into consideration, the advantages of this study are not only to employ quantitative text analysis methods but to use primary sources in Arabic, which can be expected to present the method, result, and significance in the field of Hezbollah and Islamism studies.

This paper will present the main findings of a major original fieldwork that was conducted in the borderlands of South Libya and Northern Sudan in 2021 on addressing and preventing violent extremism. A comprehensive survey/questionnaire was developed and deployed examining pull and push factors in the domain of violent extremism, and 3000 households were surveyed and interviewed by a large team of field researcher in South Libya and Northern Sudan. The analysis and presentation of the original gathered data will constitute the core of this paper and it will reflect on issues related to local communities’ experience with armed groups, recruitment dynamics, use, spread, trade, and ownership of small arms and light weapons, as well as on personal perceptions, dispositions, values with plausible effect vis-á-vis countering and preventing violent extremism. The paper will shed light on local experiences in addressing, interacting with, and preventing/confronting violent extremism that are contextualized within a broader regional setting, and it will also situate the analysis in a critical security studies conceptual framework. Approaching the policy-relevant issue of preventing violent extremism from a critical academic and scholarly perspective will challenge and problematize some key features of the commonly perceived “conventional wisdom” in this domain, and expand and explore other elements and features using the original and new qualitative and qualitative insights gathered from the field. The conclusions of this paper will go well beyond the contexts of South Libya and Northern Sudan as they will draw lessons to the wider region of the Middle East and North Africa, especially in the conflict-ridden settings.

A sizeable literature has argued that Islamist movements perform better than their non-Islamist rivals in elections and service provision, or in survival under repression due to their reputation, organizational structure, ideology, and economic policies. However, this “Islamist advantage” has mostly been analyzed in non-war settings and only relatively recently been probed in the context of armed conflict. Here, the focus has been on the comparative advantage of extremist Islamist groups in relation to more moderate (Islamic) actors, not on Islamist groups among each other. However, both comparisons are necessary in order to get a fuller understanding of what an Islamist advantage means in wartime. Specifically, I argue that both a group’s organizational structure and ideology needs to be taken into account. I demonstrate this by looking at the case of the armed Islamist group Ahrar al-Sham in the Syrian civil war which was founded with strong Salafi-jihadist credentials and both ideological and personal connections to international jihadist networks. It quickly became one of the most influential groups in Syria. In contrast to other Islamist actors, the group went through an unprecedented process of change and approximated more moderate groups in its public discourse. However, Ahrar al-Sham was also one of the most important ‘practical’ allies of the notorious jihadist groups ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, and remained divided over which course it should prioritize. These contradictions and internal divisions had a negative impact on both its ideological coherence and its ability to build a centralized organization. This had fatal consequences eventually not only for the group, but also for the insurgency as a whole in terms of losing one of the most crucial actors who could have negotiated on behalf of the (armed) Syrian opposition. Based on interviews with members and leaders of Ahrar al-Sham and other Syrian rebel groups, as well as an analysis of primary documents released by the group, I theorize what an Islamist (dis)advantage means in conflict settings characterized by intra-Islamist competition.