From Bush’s Confrontation to Obama’s Engagement with the “Muslim World”: The Production and Reproduction of Civilizations in American Foreign Policy Discourses and Practices

This paper explores how the religiously-based civilizational category of the “Muslim world”, which marks a set of countries that transcend regional blocks and a category of more than a billion people that transcend national borders, became an organizing principle of American foreign policy following 9/11. Theoretically the paper engages and seeks to contribute to a new wave of sociologically oriented post-essentialist literature on civilizations in IR represented by the work of Peter Katzenstein, Martin Hall, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, and Fabio Petito. Empirically it traces how and why with the end of the Cold War and especially in the aftermath of 9/11, the American foreign policy establishment progressively came to understand the “Muslim world” as a central strategic civilizational frame of reference in international politics. In particular, the paper unpacks and contextualizes debates taking place in Washington between the proponents of a clash and confrontation perspective and the proponents of a dialogue and engagement perspective with the “Muslim world”. Each civilizational perspective has its internal plurality of voices, which can be divided between essentialists and non-essentialists all seeking to either confront or engage with “Muslims”. The paper charts the influence of these different civilizational perspectives on both the Bush and Obama administrations’ foreign policies. It explores how confronting, during the Bush administration, and engaging, during the first Obama administration, the “Muslim world” – rather than focusing solely on particular non-state actors or nations – became part and parcel of what American Presidents and foreign policy-makers thought about and acted upon following 9/11. In the process both administrations have contributed to producing and reproducing, through specific foreign policy discourses and practices, the “Muslim world” as a meaningful political category in international relations.