Foreword: Contemporary Conflicts, Political Legitimacy and Islam

Abstract

The articles in this section discuss the origins of contemporary conflicts with a particular focus on the Arab world and the Middle East. These extend over two decades of an ever-growing spiral of violence, starting from the rise of global terrorism and culminating in the civil wars following the Arab Spring. To some extent, these conflicts are not radically different from other wars that have occurred since the end of the Cold War in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the Balkans and parts of Asia. Unlike the so-named ‘old wars’, these ‘new wars’ do not take the form of inter-state conflicts in which organized political units engage in warfare; they are substantially conflicts within the political units themselves, often leading to outright state failure (Kaldor 2012).