The new spirit of Islamism: the diffusion of strategies for success among brothers

The main aim of this research is to explain the aspirations and concerns of Islamist actors in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings by looking at two sets of relationships: the relationship between Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, the AKP) with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-muslimin fi Misr, the MB) and the relationship between the AKP and Tunisia’s Ennahda (‘Renaissance’ in English). These two relationships, details of which were not made public, were assumed to revolve around an Islamist agenda, especially because they involved the Egyptian MB, the oldest Islamist movement, whose transnational financial and operational ties, and offshoots were constantly investigated by governments around the world. However, this research demonstrates a more complex and nuanced situation, in which the main driving force was neither the MB nor Ennahda but the AKP, a non-Arab political party whose Islamist credentials are questioned within the realm of political Islam and, more importantly, by the actors involved in this interplay.
In the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings, Turkey was in the unique position of having an Islamist-leaning ruling party that had enjoyed successive electoral victories and appeared competent in running a market economy (hence the promotion of the so-called ‘Turkish model’). The aspiring Islamist parties in Tunisia and Egypt emerged from authoritarian de facto single-party regimes based on crony capitalism with no background at all in government (indeed, many politicians had just been released from jail). Turkey seized this geopolitical moment to conceive a Middle East and North Africa (MENA) dominated by governments to which it could act as ‘Big Brother’. Just as in the case of legislative and prescriptive packages designed by the EU to assist the former Soviet countries, and later Turkey, towards democratic and market-based transitions, the assumption was that certain key skills and strategies of governance were transferable, and that training could be offered to achieve particular key objectives. It was in this context that the abovementioned interrelationships were forged. This focus departs from the more common approach of examining each Islamist party in its national setting. Instead, this thesis presents the first scholarly study of the interplay between the AKP, Ennahda and the MB between 2011 and 2013, characterising the actors, the structure and the main features of the interaction and thereby illuminating a political confluence among these three critical Islamist entities in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings.
The empirical section of the thesis is based on in-depth elite interviews conducted in Tunisia, Istanbul, and Ankara since the summer of 2018. The secondary sources used are news articles, party, and movement documents in Arabic, Turkish, English, and French. Drawing upon diffusion literature and using process tracing, the study first outlines the structure, actors, interlocutors, and brokers of the process and then analyses the tactics diffused from the AKP to Ennahda and the MB.

Advisor: Willis, MJ