Abstract:
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, new representations of Islam and
Muslims have invaded the American and Western public spaces. These
representations construct Islam-related social objects as the source of Western
ontological insecurity. The present dissertation examines the emergence of American
Neoconservatism as one of the sources of those constructions; constructions that are
embodied in a twenty-first century neo-Orientalism. The thesis of the dissertation
looks into the neoconservative movement and reconsiders it as an identity and
ideologically motivated school of thought. Based on a set of interdisciplinary
approaches, the dissertation contends that since the beginning of the twenty-first
century, the neoconservative school of thought has been imposing a new foreign
policy and international (and intercultural) relations paradigm that is mainly inspired
from Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis. This
imposed paradigm is a framework of thinking that operates according to a renewed
(or neo-) Orientalism. It constructs Islam, Muslims, and the Arab-Muslim World as
existential threats to Western civilization and as the sources of its ontological
insecurity. The neoconservative discourse generates biased knowledge; and its
Manicheism, its essentialism, and its conflation of issues such as terrorism, Islamism,
Islam, and Muslims in the West and in Muslim societies, have been some of the
constructed causes of contemporary intersubjective suspicion and hatred towards
Muslims in the West and in the Muslim World. Additionally, the dissertation argues
that this twenty-first century neo-Orientalism is relayed and propagated in the
American (and Western) public space by pro-Israeli actors, mainly neoconservatives
and their like-minded allies. This neoconservative neo-Orientalism is thus essentially
instrumental for it espouses the pro-Israeli narrative in its antagonism towards the
peoples of the region, and it aims at promoting Israel’s agenda in the Near and Middle
East.
