these massacres are in fact the cornerstone of monopolization. Nevertheless, given the countervailing forces, the absorption of salafism into the world order remains incomplete. 4/4

Western logistical support, further allowed militant salafism to become a solid part of global capitalism. Even though mainstream media framed the clashes in Syria's coastal and Suwayda regions as side effects of the new regime’s lack of monopoly over legitimate violence,
3/4

from several theo-political alternatives, including progressive and conservative varieties of salafism. In their early days, they were anti-state but became more institutionalized especially in the last two decades. Mentorship by the Turkish AKP and the Gulf monarchies, as well as 2/4

Haha.
It's nothing to do with Marx or even translation. "Intercourse" used to mean a lot of other things back then.

Whether these elements could one day destabilize dominant global interests is an open question, but there is little indication that they could ever serve Syria’s popular classes.

5) State-making (on the part of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel, etc.) is not an independent force as in most political science models, but a dynamic thoroughly shaped by capital accumulation, inter-imperialist rivalry, and religious movements. 🧵

4) Regional powers such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, with their distinctive capitalist and religious interests, are also core (if subordinate) actors in inter-imperialist rivalry and Syria’s restructuring. 🧵

3) Massacres of Alawites and the Druze are an essential component of global capitalist restructuring and its interaction with changes in Islamism, rather than an accidental outcome. 🧵

2) The global decline of Brotherhood-inspired lines; the rise of salafism; but more importantly, the interactions and occasional merger of these two conflicting paths have deeply shaped conflicts in Syria and the broader region. 🧵

And the promised conceptual reconstruction comes here:

bsky.app/profile/ciha...

But the work is incomplete. An African and Asian reformulation of populism studies is long overdue.
4/4

we need to use the comparisons of the most significant neglected cases to reconstruct the concepts.

In the pieces below, I undertake some of the comparative analysis promised in my review article:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

escholarship.org/uc/item/5368...
3/

and (more rightfully so) on Latin America, but populism has arguably had more consistent impact outside the West.
Whenever cases outside the West and Latin America are studied, they are explored either untheoretically or through “applications” of existing theories. Instead,
2/