President of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (DI). He previously served as Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities (2017-2020) and Head of the Politics and International Relations Program (2015-2017) at the DI. He acquired his PhD in Political Science (1989) from the University of Reading, UK, and is the founding coordinator of the Democracy and Islam Program at the University of Westminster, UK (1998-2015). He has also worked as a pilot, London-based Sudanese diplomat, journalist, and magazine editor in the UK. He is the author of Who Needs an Islamic State? (1991), among other books and research published in peer-reviewed journals.
The term "culture" is problematic in many ways, but primarily because it is used in two opposing senses. The origins of the term culture/cultured is used with reference to an attainment in terms of developed learning, sophistication, and refined conduct. Often applied as a synonym of "civilisation", it denotes superiority over the "uneducated", uncouth, vulgar, "barbarian", etc. However, when used in the phrase "political culture", it often has negative connotations, referring to whatever beliefs, ideas, and values a community shares. In the literature, the political cultures of developed democracies are contrasted to those of shaky democracies, with political culture often taken as the key explanatory variable to the level of shakiness/stability of a democracy. In this paper, we explore the complications at the heart of this debate, starting with the two implicit, interlocking claims of culture as a prerequisite for, and an obstacle to, political development. In the first case, political culture has evolved independently of democracy and facilitated its development. In the second case, political culture plays the opposite role where political action is needed to transform culture for it to become the "right' one while, ironically, often bringing about discord and conflict. Our working hypothesis is that while political culture (especially when defined tautologically as the prevalent attitudes toward politics) does indeed shape politics, it is also shaped and/or transformed via political action. The solution is to recognise that culture is "political", which means that it is an arena of contest: one that is not necessarily "civil" at all.
Professor of Modern Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford's Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and a fellow of St Antony's College. He is an anthropologist whose research focuses on mass media, popular culture, and politics, with a specific focus on Egypt. Recent publications include Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2019), and "Meandering through the Magazine: Print Culture(s) and Reading Practices in Interwar Egypt" (Middle East Journal Culture and Communication, 2022).
This lecture will survey anthropological approaches to revolution, giving particular attention to recent scholarship on the Arab Uprisings that began in 2011. Anthropology does not have a long history of explicit engagement with revolution as a political and social phenomenon. However, demands to explain recent political upheavals in a number of locations have resulted in new disciplinary thinking about the matter. There have been efforts to devise both new anthropological insights about political revolutions, and reappraisals of disciplinary traditions that can be drawn on to crystallise a more vigorous anthropology of revolution. Anthropology's relatively slight attention to political revolution as an event contrasts with a very strong disciplinary orientation toward understanding political processes, particularly in recent decades. This lecture will explore these emerging disciplinary approaches to revolution. An anthropology of revolution to some degree mirrors tensions between structural and contingent explanations in the disciplines with long standing traditions of researching revolution as a social and political phenomenon: political science, sociology, and history. Yet the discipline's ongoing commitment to embedded "participant observation" arguably gives the anthropology of revolution a distinctive perspective, whether the focus is on events or long-term social patterns.
General Director of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. He is one of the Arab World's most prominent scholars. He has published on political thought, social theory, and philosophy. His publications include Religion and Secularism in Historical Context (in 3 vols., 2013; 2015); Sectarianism without Sects (Oxford University Press, 2021); Palestine: Matters of Truth and Justice (Hurst, 2022); On Salafism: Concepts and Contexts (Stanford University Press, 2022), among other writings. Based on empirical and theoretical investigation, his trilogy on the Arab revolutions was published by I.B. Tauris: Understanding Revolutions: Opening Acts in Tunisia (2021); Egypt: Revolution, Failed Transition and Counter-Revolution (2022); and Syria 2011-2013: Revolution and Tyranny before the Mayhem (2022).
This lecture aims to challenge the assumption that certain norms entrenched in institutions predate these institutions. It will argue that not only do these norms not necessarily predate said institutions but that such norms could also be a by-product of them. There is no simple causal relation connecting so-called political culture to the prevailing political system. The discussion should be one of political culture as opposed to culture more generally, though I will also argue that no political culture can apply to an entire people. I will explain the importance of elite political culture during a democratic transition, as well as defining a minimum required level of democratic political culture among influential elites in the first and second phases of democratic transitions and during the period where democracy is consolidated. This lecture also argues that democratic mass culture cannot emerge under autocracy, and that popular political culture must not be neglected or downplayed in contexts where there is universal suffrage and widespread access to media and communication.
Professor of Sociology, Director of the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies, and Chair of the Islamic Studies Program at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. He is President of the International Sociological Association and the editor of Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology. He has written numerous journal articles and book chapters on the sociology of religion, the connection of moral philosophy to social sciences, the sociology of (forced) migration in the case of Palestinian refugees, and the politics of scientific research. Among his recent co-authored books are The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East (with Armando Salvatore and Kieko Obuse); Knowledge Production in the Arab World: The Impossible Promise (with Rigas Arvanitis); and The Rupture between the Religious and Social Sciences (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). In 2019, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the National University of San Marcos, and in 2022 he became a lifetime corresponding fellow of the British Academy.
How much does religiosity impact political culture? In the Arab world, we often find two camps. The first camp advocates the slogan "Islam is the solution", meaning that increasing religiosity will automatically lead to religious congruence and the spread of good and justice in society. The second camp sees that religiosity not only has a minor impact on the conception of justice and political affairs, but when it does have an impact, it tends to generate political violence. For this camp, religion is understood as sets of beliefs about the world rather than rituals and community building. The lecture will deal with the concept of religiosity by reflecting on religious congruence. Religious congruence, according to Mark Chaves, encompasses three dimensions: religious ideas hang together, religious beliefs and actions hang together, and religious beliefs and values indicate stable and chronically accessible dispositions in people. After analysing some surveys conducted in the Arab World about religion in public life and ongoing research about how people conduct moral reasoning, Hanafi argues that there is plenty of evidence showing that forms of religious congruence are related not only to how social actors conceive of religion but also to other spheres of life (i.e., political, economic, social, and other sources of morality). This is why religious (in)congruence is nothing but a complex process of moral (in)congruence. Many findings presented demonstrate what Hanafi calls "practical partial secularisation from below". Religious actors are reacting to this process by either facilitating or impeding it. The various forms of secularity from above (distinction/separation of politics and religion, and state neutrality) also play a role as facilitators or impediments to moral congruence. Looking at both processes can allow us to understand the predicament of the political liberal project in the Arab world.
Founding Director of the Programs on Governance and Local Development at Yale University and University of Gothenburg, and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. She also serves as a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy in Washington, DC. She received her MA in Modern Middle East and North African Studies and her PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan, and has conducted fieldwork and implemented surveys in Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, and Tunisia. She was a co-founder of the Transitional Governance Project and a founding associate editor of Middle East Law and Governance and currently chairs its board of directors. In collaboration with Hana Brixi and Michael Woolcock of the World Bank, she published: Trust, Voice and Incentives: Learning from Local Successes in Service Delivery in the Middle East and North Africa (World Bank, 2015). She also published Everyday Choices: The Role of Competing Authorities and Social Institutions in Politics and Development (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Her current research is aimed at developing local governance indicators and examining the role of social institutions in good governance.
This lecture draws from the lecturer's book Everyday Choices. It aims to present a framework for the study and practice of politics and development that views culture in institutional terms. Scholars and practitioners seek development solutions through the engineering and strengthening of state institutions; yet the state does not constitute the only or even the primary arena shaping how citizens, service providers, and even state officials engage in actions that constitute politics and development. Individuals are members of religious orders, ethnic communities, and other groups that make claims on them, creating incentives that shape their actions. Recognising how individuals experience these claims and view the choices before them is essential to understanding political processes and development outcomes. A framework elucidating these forces is key to knowledge accumulation, designing future research, and effective programming. Drawing on findings from existing literature and her own research, the lecturer presents a framework that explains how the salience of arenas of authority associated with various communities and the nature of social institutions within them affect politics and development.
Presidential Chair Professor and Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. His research focuses on public opinion, political culture, and mass politics. He has published several books and many articles on these subjects. His book Populist Authoritarianism: Chinese Political Culture and Regime Sustainability (Oxford University Press, 2016) won the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award. Professor Tang played a leading role in the 6th and 7th World Values Surveys in China. He also served as an Academic Advisory Committee member of the Chinese Family Panel Survey (CFPS) at Peking University, the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) at Renmin University, and the Chinese Labor Dynamics Survey (CLDS) at Sun Yat-Sen University. He is a co-Editor-in-Chief of Frontiers in Political Science, Comparative Governance Section, an editorial board member of Political Psychology and Advances in Political Psychology, and an Executive Committee member of the International Political Science Association's Comparative Public Opinion Section.
This lecture will revisit the theory of democracy by examining political culture in different societies. It will first discuss the philosophical and institutional roots of the Western concept of democracy. It will show how the traditional study of democracy represents the Western liberal elites' view of the world, while overlooking public perception. Drawing data from the World Values Surveys, the lecture will show that Chinese survey respondents express a high level of satisfaction with democracy in their country, and that their understanding of democracy is not that different from the Western concept of democracy. The lecture hopes to conclude that political culture as defined by people's perception of democracy should be included in the theory of democracy. It aims to suggest that Western elites have exaggerated the ideological gap between civilisations and underestimated the potential for common needs and cooperation in different societies.
Samuel J. Eldersveld Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He has studied and conducted field research in Tunisia, Israel, Morocco, Egypt, Palestine (West Bank and the Gaza Strip), and Qatar. He is co-founder and co-director of the Arab Barometer survey project, and many of his publications are data-based studies of the attitudes and values held by ordinary citizens in the Middle East. Among the sixteen books he has authored, co-authored, or edited are Public Opinion in the Middle East: Survey Research and the Political Orientations of Ordinary Citizens (2011); Islam and Politics in the Middle East: Explaining the Views of Ordinary Citizens (2015); and Social Science Research in the Arab World and Beyond: A Guide for Students, Instructors, and Researchers (2022).
This lecture investigates the impact of electoral participation and voting on the connection between the possession of democratic values and expressed support for democracy at the individual level of analysis. This impact is measured in six Arab countries (Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan) and at three points in time (2013, 2018, and 2022), with country and time-specific attributes considered as conditionalities. Studies of democracy and democratic transitions place emphasis on the attitudes, values, and behaviour patterns of ordinary citizens. Among the relevant normative and behavioural orientations are political trust, political efficacy, political knowledge, interpersonal trust, and societal participation. These individual-level orientations are said to define a "democratic" political culture orientation. The lecture considers the impact of voting on the relationship between a belief that democracy is the best political system and the possession of democratic values and attitudes. Using Arab Barometer data, it tests two hypotheses: First, when an election is broadly free and fair, this relationship is stronger among those who have voted than among those who have not voted. Second, when an election, broadly, is not free and fair, this relationship is weaker among those who have voted than among those who have not voted.
Honorary Fellow of the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, UK, where he was a lecturer in Politics (1993-2017). He previously worked at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and at the Department of Government at the University of Texas, Austin. Prior to that he undertook undergraduate and postgraduate study at Oxford Unive rsity. He is the author of three books: The Concept of Political Culture (Macmillan, 1993), The Theory of Political Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013), and Hyperdemocracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). His teaching has covered East European politics, US politics, democratic theory, and philosophy of social science. His current interests focus on political culture and democracy in the US.
This lecture will survey the broad range of uses and conceptualisations of "political culture", and several other concepts that have been assimilated to or subsumed within it. The aim is to demonstrate not only the range of difficulties and problems that the concept continues to generate, but also the ways in which these can stimulate further research. The lecture will consider the following areas: (1) Referential scope and adjacent concepts: approaches to definition; (2) Comparative versus sociological uses of political culture; (3) Positivism and interpretivism: questions of measurement and meaning; (4) Political culture's effects: values and attitudes as explanations of behaviour, and the theory of attitudes in psychology; (5) The dynamics of political culture: how does it change, how quickly can it change, and what causes it to change?; and (6) The relationship of political culture and democracy: the question of a "democratic" political culture and the contestation of culture within a democracy: cultural politics.
Winter School