In November 2021, Erik Skare (Sciences Po, Paris) published the article “Controlling the State in the Political Theory of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad” in the special issue of Religions “Islamist Movements in the Middle East”. As existing scholarship has largely focused on the violence of the two movements when analyzing their response to the Oslo Agreement and the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority (PA) in the 1990s, Skare analyzes the Islamist opposition’s contribution to Palestinian political thought as the prospects of Palestinian self-rule confronted the two movements with fundamental questions about social organization, governance, and the permissibility of democracy. Analyzing key PIJ and Hamas texts from this period, Skare dispels the myth that there were no ideological differences between the movements in the 1990s.
You can read the article here.
