Reframing resistance and democracy: narratives from Hamas and Hizbullah

There is no model of politics without violence and no violence without a vision of the political, democratic and non-democratic. This article investigates how this claim applies to the case studies of Hamas and Hizbullah. More specifically, it looks at the archaeology of violence practised by both organizations in the name of Islamic resistance (muqawamah), examining its moral and politico-religious foundation and lineage as well as demotic impulses. Islamic resistance, I argue, not only sabotages the Weberian template of single monopoly, legitimacy and centre in the dispensation of violence, but also deploys it from the margins as part of a Godly-sanctioned ethical quest for notions of sacrifice, worship, emancipation, transnational solidarity, and civic community. It reveals a politics of knowledge-making, and power founded on a heterodoxy that interrogates Western systemic political orthodoxy and its attendant formal constructs and dogmas of violence and, indirectly, of organized politics. The discussion is prefaced by a critical assessment of this claim within Western democracies.