TRE Grantee Lawrence Rubin recently published Islam in the Balance: Ideational Threats in Arab Politics (Stanford University Press, 2014). In Islam in the Balance Rubin analyzes how ideas, or political ideology, can threaten states and how states react to ideational threats. He presents a comparative study of Egypt and Saudi Arabia and their responses to the rise of “Islamic states” in Iran and Sudan. Using the comparative study, Rubin “makes clear that transnational ideologies may present a greater and more immediate national security threat than shifts in the military balance of power: first because ideology, or ideational power, triggers threat perception and affects state policy; second because states engage in ideational balancing in response to an ideological threat.”
Rubin received a TRE grant in fall 2011 to research the Islamic movement in Israel. He published his TRE research in the Brookings Institution Saban Center Analysis Paper “Islamic Political Activism in Israel.” He has also written on “The Rise of Official Islam in Jordan” with Michael Robbins in Politics, Religion & Ideology.
Rubin is an assistant professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a faculty affiliate of the Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy. He is a co-editor of and contributor to Terrorist Rehabilitation and Counter-Radicalisation: New Approaches to Counter-terrorism (Routledge 2011).