American neoconservatism and its neo-orientalist constructions of islam and the arab muslim world

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.