Hivos and FRIDE are pleased to share with you the first publication of the project ‘Transitions and Geopolitics in the Arab World: links and implications for international actors’. This project aims to assess current trends in the Middle East and North of Africa and their linkages with domestic reform dynamics, in order to explore how these developments are likely to impact on the work and standing of international actors.
For decades, the Muslim Brotherhood focused on the need to uphold and defend Muslim identity in order to maintain organisational unity, spending less time on developing alternative policies to those of the regime. While successful in the short term, in the medium and long terms this strategy could lead to the marginalisation of the Brotherhood and its replacement by other more sophisticated forms of religiously-motivated political and social activism. Ibrahim El Houdaibi argues that its coming to power creates new challenges for the organisation that will define the group’s future path: the relation between religion and state; the shift from identity politics to policy questions; the ‘political relevance’ versus ‘religious authenticity’ dilemma; and the balance of power between the organisation and its members.
This is the link of the paper:
www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-
