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in the transition period thugs and mobs have replaced the police and established their own rule, creating a black market for small arms. These were the people who attacked the Coptic Orthodox Church’s headquarters in Cairo. Reports suggest that the security forces were also involved or at least did not prevent the attack, although they were present in front of the Cathedral. Although Morsi criticized these thugs and declared he will go after these groups, he missed an excellent opportunity to start reforming the security services by not taking concrete actions at this point. If he did start to reform the security sector, this would not only ease relations between Morsi and the opposition, but also prevent the further alienation of the Copts. 

how can Copts and Muslims coexist if they do not negotiate, but instead take to the streets?

The new pope, Pope Tawadros, has been politically much more outspoken and active than his predecessor. Pope Tawadros is smart enough to understand that feloul politics (those of the former regime) will no longer be tolerated in Egypt. He realizes that his base has awakened and that he needs to establish his rule over and against the heritage of the charismatic late Pope Shenouda. Both the church and its Pope will be much more active and demanding in Egyptian politics.

‘They wanted to stop us from protesting, we protested. We have a non-violent philosophy, which we maintained in the face of extreme violence. An incredible force of young Cameroonians. We started out almost 300 and ended up less than 50 but (being a) nugget has banished fear, for ourselves and for many other Cameroonians. The population did not join us in droves, but: not one person out of hundreds complained about the blocking on the road; If we ever doubted it, we now have extreme clarity on the absolute need for change and the absolute need for unwavering determination in bringing it about in our country.’ Six members of Cameroon O’Bosso have been arrested and remain in detention.

I am sure global corporate media are aware of what is happening and it’s clear that choices are made on which conflicts and revolutions are covered.

The mistake the media and activists in the West make is to believe that the voice of revolution has to be highly vocal and visible to their world. On the contrary, there are thousands of activists and social justice movements from across Africa and the diaspora who are totally committed to achieving political and social change in their respective countries. It just takes a little effort and time to know what is happening.

As informed citizens and if we are to see ourselves as part of the revolutionary process, then we need to try and grasp an understanding of the layers of narrative and actions which are taking place, not just across Africa but on a global level.

Empirical evidence does not support either of these assumptions – witness the European ISIS volunteers who arrive in Syria with copies of Islam for Dummies or the alleged leader of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was reported to have drunk whisky and smoked cannabis

Yet radicalisation theories have been officially accepted and popularised. This is because they provide a rationale for surveillance (it is easier for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to find ideologues than terrorists). And they conveniently disavow the cycle of violence we have entered.

What radicalisation theories ignore is that violence in the ‘war on terror’ is relational: the individuals who become ISIS volunteers are willing to use violence; so too are our own governments.

These recruits are not corrupted by ideology but by the end of ideology: they have grown up in the era of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”, of no alternatives to capitalist globalisation. They have known no critique, only conspiracy theory, and are drawn to apocalyptic rather than popular struggle. Nevertheless, for all its lack of actual political content, the narrative of global war against the west feels to its adherents like an answer to the violence of racism, poverty and empire.

The intellectual reaction to the Paris attacks has continued these patterns. The dominant feature is a narcissism that describes ISIS as simply the polar opposite of whatever we value in ourselves. For liberals, ISIS is intolerance, racism and oppression of women. For conservatives, ISIS is the ideal enemy: fanatical, non-western and barbaric. In this mode, ISIS is merely the absolute ‘other’ that enables the construction of a positive image of ourselves.

This means that the most appropriate response to ISIS is to see it as a symptom of the ‘normal’ functioning of the modern, global system, rather than as an external element corrupting the system from outside or from the pre-modern past. Its use of social media, its rejection of the national borders of the twentieth century and its linkages to the petroleum economy all demonstrate that ISIS is a child of globalisation.

ISIS is certainly a monster but a monster of our own making. It was born in the chaos and carnage that followed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Its sectarian ideology and funding has come from the Saudi and Gulf ruling elites, the west’s closest regional allies after Israel. Russia and Iran have also played their role, propping up the Bashar al-Assad regime – responsible for far more civilian deaths than ISIS – and prolonging the war in Syria that enables ISIS to thrive.

The left should be much bolder in asserting that only an anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics can provide a genuine alternative to jihadism; that more radicalisation, in the genuine sense of the word, is the solution, not the problem; that terrorism thrives in environments where mass movements advancing visions of social progress have been defeated.

We must therefore defend the spaces of radical politics, for the right to dream of another world.

there are two broad approaches to making sense of ‘Islamic extremism’: there are conservatives who regard Islam as an inherently violent culture defined essentially by its founding texts, and liberals who think the enemy is a totalitarian perversion of Islam that emerged in the twentieth century.

When the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood unexpectedly did well in the 2006 Egyptian parliamentary elections, he implied, Washington pressure on Mubarak to democratize vanished. Ibrahim warned that the future of the Arab world was democratic, and that the opinion polling done by his Ibn Khaldoun Institute demonstrated that the democracy would have a strong Islamic coloration.