ABSTRACT
This chapter presents Islamism as an entry into the crises of the postcolonial state, to locate them on a larger landscape of developmental political economy and explores them under the sign of governmentality and rule. It briefly describes three governable spaces, in particular the space of chieftainship, the space of indigeneity and the space of the nation state. The political field of which the likes of Al-Qaeda or Hit al-Tahir al-Islami are part, represents a cultural and political movement that contains universalistic aspirations and yet remains resolutely particular and local. Islamism is a sort of articulation–the language is from Stuart Hall who refers to the simultaneous process of the interpellation of an identity and of a political project–that has produced a militant Muslim vanguard that must be located on a larger landscape of global Islamic revival. Islamism has seized the imagination of sections of urbanised youth by throwing down the gauntlet of anti-imperialist populist nationalism.
