Islamism and the New Disintegration of Empires

Abstract

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. Islamism allows both men and women to realize strategies, which give them a chance to succeed in situation when role models of their parents stopped functioning. In the end of the interview, one finds analysis of the perspectives of the so called Islamic State, forbidden in Russia and elsewhere: the sociologist shows how it will inevitably be involved in the dynamics of contemporary world-system.