Joseph J. Kaminski received his PhD in Political Science from Purdue University in 2014 and currently holds the rank of Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations (PSIR) at the International University of Sarajevo (IUS). He is also a Research Associate and Mentorship Program Coordinator at the Ummatics Institute. His works have appeared in journals such as Social Compass, PS: Political Science & Politics, Comparative Political Theory, the American Journal of Islam and Society, and the Thunderbird International Business Review. He has also the published two solo-authored manuscripts: The Contemporary Islamic Governed State: A Reconceptualization (2017, Palgrave) and Islam, Liberalism, and Ontology: A Critical Re-evaluation (2021, Routledge). His current research interests include religion and politics, comparative political theory, and new approaches to Islam and public reason. Kaminski's current manuscript project (under contract with Oneworld) aims to offer a novel perfectionist model of Islamicate public reason that draws from the theoretical architecture of contemporary Confucian political thought.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

One of the most exciting recent developments in this subfield that I like to call Applied Islamic Political Theory has been the growing effort to theorize political order beyond the conceptual and structural confines of the modern nation-state. While Muslim intellectuals have long critiqued foreign imposed secularism, imperialism, and colonialism’s deleterious effects on Islamic societies, the past decade or so has witnessed a seismic shift from merely critiquing the malign consequences of the Westphalian model toward a more foundational interrogation of the normative and ontological viability of the nation-state project itself. A central catalyst for this shift has been Wael Hallaq’s now canonical The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (2015), which contends that the notion of an “Islamic state” is not only politically impracticable but conceptually incoherent. For Hallaq, the modern nation-state is a product of Western modernity, grounded in epistemological and structural logics such as state sovereignty, codification, and bureaucratic control that fundamentally contradict the moral and epistemic foundations of Islamic governance.

A related contribution can be found in Andrew March’s well-received book, The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought (2019), particularly in its concluding chapters, where he critically examines the coherence of the nation-state centric “Muslim democracy” project. He approaches Islamic governance as a discursive tradition rather than a fixed institutional blueprint and interrogates whether Islamic political normativity can operate independently of the modern concept of sovereignty. In doing so, March highlights the tensions between Islamic political thought and the liberal presuppositions that underlie dominant frameworks of legitimacy, law, and political agency.

This broader normative reorientation away from trying to ‘fit-into’ the nation-state model has also been advanced by a range of other well-established contemporary scholars, including Ovamir Anjum (University of Toledo), Salman Sayyid (University of Leeds), Farid Esack (University of Johannesburg), and Taha Abdurrahman (Professor Emeritus, Mohammed V University). In parallel, a younger cohort of new scholars just starting their careers like Jaan Islam (Boğaziçi University), Fadi Zatari (Sabahattin Zaim University), Ali Harfouch (MA, American University of Beirut), and Ilham Ibrahim (MA, Ibn Haldun University) has also emerged, engaging critically with state-centric paradigms and proposing alternative frameworks grounded in Islamic tradition. Finally, I ought to mention here that the Ummatics Institute, with which I am affiliated, is similarly invested in exploring post-statist models of Islamic social organization, aiming to revive a civilizational perspective that prioritizes umma-based solidarity over national territoriality.

While these aforementioned scholars differ in methodological orientation, they all converge around a shared commitment to reconceptualizing Islamic collectivity, governance, and normativity beyond the coercive, secular, and fragmentary logic of the modern state. Their work challenges Muslim political thought not merely to seek alternative modes of power, but to reclaim a deeper political imagination rooted in Qur’anic ethics, Prophetic praxis, and the enduring normative traditions of the umma. These efforts also have significant implications for the field of international relations, calling into question the state-centric ontology that underpins much of its theoretical architecture and gesturing instead toward civilizational and identity-based forms of political organization that transcend territorial sovereignty.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

As I argued in an article published with the Ummatics Institute in 2022, I have come to the conclusion that the nation-state model represents a strategic and conceptual dead end for much of the Muslim world. The failed Arab Spring did not give rise to democratic or Islamic renewal, but rather to a new, very ugly synthesis of increasingly centralized autocracy, crass consumer capitalism, state approved/mandated ‘traditional Islam,’ and an ever-expanding surveillance infrastructure. As I often tell my students in Bosnia and Herzegovina: “If you think European nationalism today is alarming, just wait until you see what Saudi or Emirati nationalism will look like in two decades.” This post-Arab Spring, authoritarian hybrid model, now increasingly underwritten by partnerships with Israeli and American Big Tech........

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