196 Franz nuscheler
These authors’ emphasis on the ‘Islamist threat’ as the primary reason
behind, and the major push factor for, migration is not convincing, for
several reasons. First, it sweepingly demonises Islamism, with its very dif-
ferent shapes and forms, as an overall extremist and potentially terrorist
movement. Lübben (2008: 111), on the other hand, exonerates the Muslim
Brotherhood. They do not represent an ‘extremist Islamist power, but are
rather an integral part of Egyptian society’ and oriented toward domestic
political reform – after all, they were the ones who demanded and forced
democratic reforms from an authoritarian regime. These authors may tend
to forget that pragmatism was also invoked as protection against repression,
but they do contradict the superf icial identif ication of Islamism with a
potential terrorist threat.
Second, limiting the conf lict potential to the ‘Islamist threat’ largely
ignores other endogenous reasons for conf lict and migration – for example,
distributional conf licts over dwindling resources (land, water, jobs etc.) due
to a growing population and climate change, the inability of most MENA
countries to provide their still rapidly growing (and thus young) popula-
tions with prospects at home, and the repression by autocratic regimes of
minorities or opposition groups.
Third, focusing solely on domestic-conf lict potential also disregards
the inf luence of external interests in this geopolitically important and
resource-rich region – something that has become even more important
in the ‘war on terror’. While the Middle East and security expert Perthes
(2000) stresses the relative autonomy of regional actors, and thus questions
conspiracy theories regarding US hegemony, he does not deny the inf luence
of external actors on the dynamics of conf lict. Following the upheavals in
the Arab world he again notes:
Western countries had to realise that they could not inf luence the
outbreak of such transitions, and that they could only marginally
inf luence their course. They can help or be in the way, but they cannot
determine the outcomes of these radical changes (Perthes 2011: 63).Research on what causes war has, for decades now, tried to differentiate
between the internal and external factors in this conglomerate, propos-
ing, as an alternative to the ‘Islamist threat’ as the sole reason for conf lict
in the MENA states, the theory of ‘internationalised conf licts’. The high
potential for conf lict in the regional subsystem called the Middle East – and
the resulting migration patterns – correlate with the historically grown