Bøker av Olivier Roy

A brilliant analysis of identity politics today by world-renowned thinker Olivier Roy. Roy's new book explores the extension of individual political and sexual freedoms from the 1960s, leading us to today's fractures.

In a new, revised edition of his acclaimed book, Olivier Roy examines the political development of central Asia, from Russian conquests to the "War on Terror” and beyond.During the anti-Gorbachev coup in August 1991, most communist leaders from Soviet central Asia backed the plotters. Within weeks of the coup's collapse, those same leaders—now transformed into ardent nationalists — proclaimed the independence of their nations, adopted new flags and new slogans, and discovered a new patriotism.How were these new nations built among peoples without any traditional nationalist heritage and no history of independent governance? Roy argues that Soviet practice had always been to build on local institutions and promote local elites, and that Soviet administration—as opposed to Soviet rhetoric—was always surprisingly decentralized in the farflung corners of the empire. Thus, with home-grown political leaders and administrative institutions, national identities in central Asia emerged almost by stealth.Roy's analysis of the new states in central Asia—Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tadjikstan, Kirghizstan and Azerbaijan—provides a glimpse of the future of an increasingly fragmented and dangerous region.

Are Europe's 'Christian values' under threat? Can religion be a pillar of identity and culture? What will be the fate of Christianity in Europe?In this short but bracing book, Olivier Roy traces the Church's long battle against a tide of secularization in Europe. Since the Enlightenment, religion has been losing ground as the source of moral norms. But while the question of truth was contested, Christian values continued to define law and social life in even the most secular and anti-clerical countries--until the 1960s. Ever since, the Church has been swept into a new war of values, reduced to struggling over abortion and same-sex marriage. Mired in scandal, the Church's authority is crumbling, while populist demands pave the way for the final secularization of religion as part of 'national culture'. From one of the most acute observers of our times, 'Is Europe Christian?' represents a persuasive and novel vision of religion's place today.

In this book-length interview, Olivier Roy, a leading expert on political Islam, tells the story of how his many adventures and discoveries have shaped his understanding of the Islamic world. In Search of the Lost Orient is both a significant intellectual autobiography and a compelling travelogue.

Everything you need to know about how Islamic State attracts new followers, by a world-renowned sociologist of Islam.

Roy demonstrates that the Islamic Fundamentalism of today is still the Third Worldism of the 1960s: populist politics and mixed economies of laissez-faire for the rich and subsidies for the poor. In Roy's formulation, those marching today beneath Islam's green banners are the same as the "reds" of yesterday, with similarly dim prospects of success.

The denunciation of fundamentalism in France, embodied in the law against the veil and the deportation of imams, has shifted into a systematic attack on all Muslims and Islam. This hostility is rooted in the belief that Islam cannot be integrated into French and, consequently, secular and liberal-society. However, as Olivier Roy makes clear in this book, Muslim intellectuals have made it possible for Muslims to live concretely in a secularized world while maintaining the identity of a "e;true believer."e; They have formulated a language that recognizes two spaces: that of religion and that of secular society.Western society is unable to recognize this process, Roy argues, because of a cultural bias that assumes religious practice is embedded within a specific, traditional culture that must be either erased entirely or forced to coexist in a neutral, multicultural space. Instead, Roy shows that new forms of religiosity, such as Islamic fundamentalism and Christian evangelicalism, have come to thrive in post-traditional, secular contexts precisely because they remain detached from any cultural background. In recognizing this, Roy recasts the debate concerning Islam and democracy. Analyzing the French case in particular, in which the tension between Islam and the conception of Western secularism is exacerbated, Roy makes important distinctions between Arab and non-Arab Muslims, hegemony and tolerance, and the role of the umma and the sharia in Muslim religious life. He pits Muslim religious revivalism against similar movements in the West, such as evangelical Protestantism and Jehovah's Witnesses, and refutes the myth of a single "e;Muslim community"e; by detailing different groups and their inability to overcome their differences. Roy's rare portrait of the realities of immigrant Muslim life offers a necessary alternative to the popular specter of an "e;Islamic threat."e; Supporting his arguments with his extensive research on Islamic history, sociology, and politics, Roy brilliantly demonstrates the limits of our understanding of contemporary Islamic religious practice in the West and the role of Islam as a screen onto which Western societies project their own identity crisis.

Instead of freeing the world from religion, secularization has encouraged a kind of holy ignorance to take root. This book explores the options available to powers that hope to integrate or control these groups; and whether marginalization or homogenization will further divide believers from their culture.

Examining the political development of Central Asia, this book argues that Soviet practice had always been to build on local institutions and promote a local elite making it decentralized. It also contains an analysis of the Central Asian states - Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kirghizstan and Azerbaijan.

Investigates the emergence of a militant deterritorialized Islam that has fewer links to any particular country and/or culture. This book argues that mainstream Islamist movements in the Muslim world have become Islamo-nationalist, recasting their political action within a national framework (e.g. the Hamas of Palestine, the Hezbullah of Lebanon).

Argues that Islamic revival, or "re-Islamization," results from the efforts of westernized Muslims to assert their identity in a non-Muslim context. This book provides a comparison of several transnational movements, whether peaceful, like Tablighi Jama'at and the Islamic brotherhoods, or violent, like Al Qaeda.