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Islamism emerged as a political vision in the last decades of the 20th century. It first became an instrument of political action in the years before World War I, when Muslim organizations of a new type appeared in Indonesia and India. Islamist organizations thrived as colonization buckled, but their success was halted at independence by secular autocrats and military strongmen. Then came the 1979 revolution in Iran and the establishment of an Islamic Republic. Islamism, or Political Islam, was all of a sudden the ideology and governing principle of a country that only a few years before had imagined itself as a great power. In the 1980s, Iran and Pakistan were rare examples of Islamic Republics, and experiments for what Islamic democracy was like. Empirically, those regimes were clearly democratic, to the extent that they organized competitive elections, but also clearly illiberal, which, given the autocratic nature of the regimes in the region, could not be easily imputed to Islam alone. The theoretical question whether Islamism could be compatible with democracy reached Arab shores in 1991, when an Algerian Islamist party poised to win parliamentary elections could have made a claim on the government. The skies suddenly opened in 2011 with a wave of democratic transition sweeping through the Middle East with the Arab Spring. Islamist parties share the responsibility for the deterioration post Arab Spring—and none more so than the Egyptian Freedom and Justice Party, the political outlet of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is more compelling to look at the social and cultural makeup of the region, as well as in the vulnerabilities specific to the democratic system of governance.

Regardless of period, location, natural environment, and population density, human communities have been regulated by norms of governance. While those norms co-evolve at the level of the species, they retain local differences and adaptations, and they do not teleologically converge toward a single civilizational model. Such normative and institutional differences often pass for a failure of governance, or even for ungovernance in the case of simple societies judged by more complex ones. Colonialism and imperialism put pressure on all societies around the world to adopt notions of governance and a common set of institutions pioneered by European states. The emergence of political Islam as an alternative to Western models, and in particular the expansion of jihadism in the resource-poor areas of the Muslim world, reminds us that history has not reached its end and that forms of governance will continue to evolve.

Camille Pecastaing looks at the twenty-first-century challenges facing the region around the Bab el Mandeb-the tiny strait that separates the Red Sea from the Indian Ocean-from civil war, piracy, radical Islamism, terrorism and the real risk of environmental and economic failure on both sides of the strait. The author takes us with him into Somalia and Yemen, Eritrea and Djibouti, with excursions into Ethiopia and the Sudan, as he reveals how the economic and environmental crisis currently in gestation could lead to more social dislocation and violence in this strategically important region.

When newly elected French President Francois Hollande squarely renounced the brutality and injustice of the whole era of French colonialism before the Algerian Parliament on Dec 20, 2012, he created headlines on both shores of the Mediterranean. Some found in Hollande's words vindication for the evil of European imperialism, while others saw an indiscriminate betrayal of French and Western civilizing values. That was the result Hollande intended. The polarization he created bolstered both the French and Algerian governments in trying times. The history of the two countries has always been inflammatory. Paris forced itself on Algiers in 1830 with a quasi-genocide and left it in 1962 amid a shocking outburst of torture, terrorism, and ethnic cleansing that outdid the occasional massacres and unending discrimination of the long years of colonial occupation. Postcolonial victimization fuels the hostility of the jihadist current, and if for that reason alone, it is essential for Western capitals to extricate themselves from that legacy.

Much has been made of the recent success of Islamist parties in national elections that followed the Arab Spring. While some praise Islamism as the first genuine expression of popular sovereignty in a long time, others warn of an Islamic winter. They read Islamist candidates as a fifth column for a fundamentalist theocracy, or at best for an illiberal democracy where individual liberties suffer under the overbearing presence of religion in the public sphere. Both readings are wrong because history is not yet written, and the Islamists know no better than anyone where their recent success might take them. And while their ascent appears almost universal -- they are now in government in many Arab countries -- their accession to the highest levels of power has been contextual. Starting from common origins, they followed different routes to get there. More than anything, what they showed over the decades in the wilderness was pragmatism and adaptability to challenging environments, characteristics that they will have to draw upon to move from the conquest to the exercise of power in the post-Arab Spring era. Adapted from the source document.

Regardless of period, location, natural environment, and population density, human communities have been regulated by norms of governance. While those norms co-evolve at the level of the species, they retain local differences and adaptations, and they do not teleologically converge toward a single civilizational model. Such normative and institutional differences often pass for a failure of governance, or even for ungovernance in the case of simple societies judged by more complex ones. Colonialism and imperialism put pressure on all societies around the world to adopt notions of governance and a common set of institutions pioneered by European states. The emergence of political Islam as an alternative to Western models, and in particular the expansion of jihadism in the resource-poor areas of the Muslim world, reminds us that history has not reached its end and that forms of governance will continue to evolve.