Instructor in the Department of Political Science at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon, US. He holds an MA and a PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, and a BS in Political Science from the University of Iowa. His research and teaching interests cover international relations theory; international security; modern and contemporary Iranian politics; and US Foreign Policy. His first book, Post-Revolutionary Iran: The Leader, the People, and the Three Powers, was published with Rowman & Littlefield in April 2021 and released in paperback in August 2022.
This paper explores varied expressions of crisis and their impact on political culture through a case study of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The paper follows two lines of empirical inquiry in its attempt to identify and explain the meanings and consequences of crisis on political culture in the Iranian case: quantitative analysis of social survey data (World Values Survey, IranPoll, and the Group for Analysing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran) and qualitative analysis of reform-oriented social movements. Through this mixed-method approach, the paper draws attention to the dynamics of regime reproduction and durability as well as the broader shifts in mass political culture in Iran. The paper advances a novel perspective on the relationship between culture and crisis, what the paper terms the "cultural transition model", arguing that societies prefer protest under circumstances in which cultural change from high confidence to low confidence in government is met by the state with repression rather than reform. The paper contributes to our understanding of the relationship between crisis and political culture by demonstrating that the transition from high to low public confidence in state institutions, rather than a static cultural measure, is critical in our understanding of how cultural change shapes political action.
PhD student in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, UK, and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Syrian Studies. He previously worked as Policy Leader Fellow and Research Assistant at the European University Institute and EUI Middle East Directions Programme, and Research Fellow at the Syrian Centre for Policy Research, Beirut. He combines 12 years of professional and academic experience as a Humanitarian Affairs Consultant for several donors, INGOs, and international agencies in the region, and as a scholar-activist, where his academic research is embedded in the context of activism, human rights, forced displacement, migration, security, civic spaces, and justice. His research focuses on the political economy of the Syrian diaspora, humanitarianism, transnationalism, and authoritarian resistance in Syria. His most recent publication is "Supporting Internally Displaced People: Transnational Solidarity and the Syrian Diaspora" (2022).
The Syrian regime had undergone changes in the decade prior to the 2011 revolutions. These changes enabled the emergence of aspiring democratic discourses and stimulated transformations in political culture by allowing a limited space for the development of opposition groups, advocacy for human rights, platforms and forums for political participation. With the opening of such spaces, it became possible to see the development of a Syrian civil society centered around modern values and aspiration for political pluralism. By presenting cases of opposition activity and political thought in Syria in the years preceding the revolution, this paper seeks to challenge the idea that Arabs and Islamic values contradict principles of democracy, participation, and pluralism. The paper discusses the cases of several Syrian intellectuals, academics, and religious leaders and their struggle for democratization, pluralism, and political reforms. The paper also discusses the emergence of diaspora institutions (i.e., Syrian civil society) post-2011. In doing so, the paper seeks to discuss the political culture amongst political activists during the 2000s in Syria and how this helped shape the continued resistance to the regime in the diaspora.
PhD student in Political Science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She specialises in comparative politics, experimental methods, and identity politics. Her regional specialisation is predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. Her most recent funded projects include a comparative study of the integration of former collaborators into Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, and Nigeria. Her doctoral thesis addresses how a past of collaboration with an insurgent group impacts an individual's likelihood of being integrated back into different spheres of society. Her research has received funding from the National Association of University Women, Khpal Kor Foundation (KKF), and the Afghanistan Democracy and Development Organization (ADDO).
As cities and states transition from rule by armed groups to legitimate governments, concerns regarding integrating former collaborators back into society rise. This process is complicated by the overlap of ethnicity with insurgent groups, and by the fact that collaboration with these groups has often been widespread. Previous work has shown that the nature of collaboration shapes re-integration of civilians, while ethnicity has relatively little impact. Employing a conjoint survey experiment conducted in Kabul, Afghanistan, this paper expands earlier work from civilian to elite collaborators and considers a case where identity considerations are likely to be important. The paper finds that respondents are less likely to vote for political candidates that have a history of collaboration and that they are more likely to vote for co-ethnic collaborators than non-co-ethnic collaborators. Finally, the paper finds that the role a group plays in the conflict determines whether a motivated reasoning of politics or respectability dynamic holds in their assessment of in-group and out-group members.
PhD student in Government, University of Essex, UK. He received an MA in Ideology and Discourse Analysis from Essex, an MA in Public Policy from FLACSO, Ecuador, and his BA in Political Science from Universidad de Belgrano, Argentina. He has worked as a public servant at the Ecuadorian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at the Development Bank of Ecuador. His academic interests lie in the intersection of political theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, religion, and ideology in postcolonial contexts. He has published a book on the meaning of the tithe's survival in nineteenth century Ecuador.
Ecuador has replaced its constitution nineteen times since independence. The Constituent Assemblies (CAs) in charge of writing the new constitution have been convened by democratic and non-democratic "caudillos" ("authoritarian" leaders). How can we best characterise and account for Ecuador's constitutional volatility? The literature on constitutional instability speaks of legal, economic, context-dependent, and institutionalist explanations accounting for this type of instability. Despite their usefulness, these schools fall short in identifying and elucidating the ideological grip obtained by the frequent abolition-replacement of the constitution in force. From a transdisciplinary perspective, this paper contributes to our understanding of this type of emotional phenomenon in presidential Latin America. Drawing on history, ideology, and psychoanalysis, the paper conducts a diachronic discourse analysis of the ideological grip procured by the constant destruction of the Ecuadorian charter. It argues that Ecuador's long-lasting history of political instability has prompted a political culture prone to supporting messianic leaders—that is, lawgivers whose images have blended with the aspiration of perpetual stability found in CAs. This work focuses on the 1869 and 2007-2008 CAs. These constitutional processes were highly influenced by Presidents Gabriel García Moreno, Eloy Alfaro, and Rafael Correa, key "lawgivers" in Ecuador's history.
Teaching Assistant in the Politics Department at Otago University. Her prime research interests comprise politics and religion, pact-making, and populism in the MENA region. She pursued her undergraduate and master's degrees in Oriental Studies at Sapienza University of Rome and has lived and studied in Egypt and Tunisia, which remain her main geographic areas of interest. In her PhD thesis, she explored the change capacity of the Ennahda Movement and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood by unpacking their organisational dynamics in the post-uprisings period (2011–2020) and assessing the overall imprint that those dynamics left on their respective organisations ten years later.
Following the 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections, Tunisian domestic politics has plunged into a state of institutional and political impasse. On July 25, 2021, amid widespread anti-government protests, Tunisia's current president, Kais Saied, ousted the prime minister and suspended parliament. In the six months since the president's power grab, party leaders and key civic actors took shifting, ambivalent, and disaggregated stances on Saied's move. Drawing on a political party perspective, this paper invites us to examine the historical legacy of Tunisian pact-making and alliance politics by applying Timothy Mitchell's theory of the State Effect framed in a historical perspective. In doing so, this paper contends that Tunisian pact-making in the post-July 2021 setting follows similar opposition coordination patterns that emanated from the state-idea of the Tunisian One-Party State. On the occasion of Saied's presidential coup, political forces have preferred to unite exclusively and selectively, driven by the "secular vs Islamist divide" fuelled under the Tunisian One-Party State. The Tunisian selective consensus that emerged from the post-2021 scenario provides us with an instrumental case study to reflect on how pre-existing group values drive alliance politics and contribute to authoritarian regression.
Research Assistant at the Institute of Social Sciences. He holds a BA and an MA from the University of Belgrade's Department of Oriental Studies, Faculty of Philology, and is currently pursuing a PhD within the same Department. He also holds an MA degree in International Politics from the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Political Sciences. His research interests include various areas of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, as well as Political Sciences and Public Opinion research. He has presented his research at universities such as Cambridge, Harvard, Chicago, Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Bonn, Bratislava, Sofia, Yerevan, among others.
This paper will examine negative attitudes towards the foreign policy and citizens of the US that are present in the Arab world. It will briefly explore relevant literature on sources of anti-American sentiments among the populations of Arab countries. Based on that, the paper hypotheses that American hegemonism, religiosity, satisfaction with internal conditions in a given country, and general openness to the world determine the political and societal anti-Americanism of the citizens of Arab countries. To examine that, the paper analyses data gathered in 2018 and 2019 during Wave V of the Arab Barometer, a regional public opinion survey, which was conducted in twelve different countries.
PhD student in the International Relations Department at Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey. Since September 2018, she has worked as a research and teaching assistant at Sabancı and Koç Universities. Her MA thesis examines the effect of ethnic and religious ties on the emergence and persistence of solidarity between Arab-Turkish citizens and Syrians in Turkey and the areas of contestation and conflict between the two communities. Her research interests include nationalism, state-making, migration studies, and identity politics. She has presented her research at international conferences organised by the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) and Humboldt University, Berlin.
Poland and Turkey show parallelism in terms of the factors explaining the (il)legal status of abortion in the literature, such as the influence of religion in policy-making, a pious population, authoritarian populism, the feminist movement, and anti-global exclusive nationalism. Why, then, was abortion banned in Poland, which is more democratic, better in terms of women's empowerment and gender equality, and a member of the EU, and not in Turkey, despite a legal attempt to ban it? This paper argues that the role of religion in state-making accounts for the difference. Although religious mobilisation played an essential role in the making of both Poland and Turkey, the Catholic Church's influence has continued, while Turkey's political elite initiated a path toward secular modernisation that divided society along secular and religious lines. Despite the ever-increasing power of religion in politics and society, the whole of Turkish society, unlike in Poland, does not embrace religion as the saviour of the nation. Therefore, the capacity of religion to regulate social life and politics is less in Turkey than in Poland.
PhD student in Political Science and International Relations at the Institute for Political Studies at Universidade Católica Portuguesa. She holds an MA degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Lund University and a postgraduate course in Strategic and Security Studies. Her focus is on the Middle East and Gulf region, where she spent a year as a visiting researcher at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. Her research interests lie in politics, governance, transition, history, conflict, art, and religion.
Despite being portrayed as a peaceful country, Oman has also seen sporadic initiatives of young people expressing their grievances about the lack of opportunities. Yet, the focus on political culture in Oman is scarce and usually unwilling to understand its youth. As envisaged by Sultan Qaboos bin Sa'id, Omani society has been modernised. In this process, this paper argues that the Omani citizen emerged as a neutral citizen, which the author defines as "a subject characterised by taking few stances or limited public self-expression on political matters". Although neutrality is often perceived as someone who is depoliticised, in this case, the argument is that neutrality is in itself a political choice, which contradicts the usual depictions of Omanis as passive or alienated from politics. Despite the lack of political participation, many young people are aware of what is happening in their surroundings and are actively engaged in the virtual sphere. Thus, the country's political culture is not stagnant. The complex dynamics of internal and external changes are crucial to understanding how political culture develops and influences the relationship between the elites and ordinary citizens. This paper aims to concentrate on the young, vibrant layer of the population and to understand their views and conceptualisation of political engagement. It examines how young Omani citizens are redefining the values that drive politics and becoming an engine for potential changes. Supported by fieldwork methodology, the paper intends to understand how they distinguish themselves from the older generations as they navigate a landscape of challenges and the leadership transition of Sultan Haitham.
PhD student in Institutions and Politics at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (UniCatt) in Milan, Italy. Her research interests focus on Islamism, political activism and participation, political violence, gender, and religion studies. She works with Gramscian theory, subalternity, and decolonial approaches. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on women in the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, theoretically relying on performance and politics studies and adopting a historical case-study research design. Prior to that, she worked as a Research Assistant at the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan in Amman focusing on Jordanian politics, Islamism, and religion in public space in the MENA region.
This paper aims at deciphering female participation within the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood (JMB). It relies on the theoretical framework provided by performance and politics studies while aiming at reconstructing the history of female participation within the movement from the early 1950s until today. The paper aims at mapping the morphology of women within the JMB, looking at their work and participation in the organisation, including its political party branches (1992-). This would be done on three different levels: women in the main political party branch, the Islamic Action Front (IAF); women's participation in the parties that split off from the IAF after that party's fracturing since 2011; and women's participation in Islamist educational and charity sectors. Furthermore, the goal is to narrate women's perspectives in the JMB, and their understanding of leadership, power, and future opportunities. The paper employs a historical case-study design and focuses on qualitative methods. It will result in the first major study on the important subject of Islamist women's participation in Jordan. The paper will make an important contribution to our understanding of the intersection between women and Islamism, which carries relevance for those studying Islamist parties in the entire region and for scholars focusing on female political participation in politics.
PhD student in Comparative Politics at the Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy, and International Relations at Central European University (CEU). She is a Junior Fellow at the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS). She is also the Chair of the Middle East and North Africa Space (MENAS) at CEU, the co-principal investigator of the Arab Elections project, and was the co-principal investigator of a post-election survey fielded in Tunisia, which will contribute to the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES).
According to theories on ideological differences, individuals who endorse the values of freedom, justice, and equality are expected to be left-wing oriented, whereas individuals who endorse authoritarian values are expected to be right-wing oriented. This paper hypothesises that such associations do not hold in the Arab world, where in the context of past state formation trajectories, leftists and secularists endorsed an authoritarian-nationalist discourse to build post-colonial states, while Islamists endorsed a freedom-and-justice discourse as a reaction to state oppression. Using original representative face-to-face survey data collected right after the 2019 Tunisian elections, this paper tests this hypothesis by examining which values determine citizens' voting behaviour in both parliamentary and presidential elections. Results show that people who endorse liberty-and-justice values are more likely to vote for Islamist right-wing parties, whereas those who endorse authoritarian-nationalist values are more likely to vote for leftist parties. These results have important implications for the study of voting behaviour in the Arab world and in comparative politics.
Research Associate at the Bundeswehr Center for Military History and Social Sciences. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin with a project on the relations between Germany and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), which has a strong empirical grounding based on several months of field research across the KRI. Her research interests include security studies, post-conflict transformation, political economy, and migration. Her latest two articles deal with the political and military situation in Sinjar after 2014 and migration attitudes after the KRI's latest financial crisis.
When talking about the critical role of Western actors in the Middle East, the focus usually falls on the US, Great Britain, or France. Far less researched is the German influence, despite the region's utmost geo-strategic importance on the borderlands of the European neighbourhood. Yet, Germany's involvement in Iraq seems to be benevolently tolerated, potentially even welcomed, as a non-Mandate power, the second largest aid-donor, and a reluctant military interventionist. While much has been written about Germany's historically developed culture of strategic military restraint, far less is known about the impact of other employed means of promoting stability, political change, and conflict transformation. Under these circumstances, this paper examines: Which ideas and values have been promoted by Germany during interactions with Iraq and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) between 1991 and 2020? The focus lies on the way specific German sets of values, beliefs, and attitudes are being implemented in Iraq and the KRI to promote stability, political change, and conflict transformation outside of the military realm, targeting both government institutions as well as civil society groups. The work is based on field work conducted in the region in 2019 and 2022.
PhD student in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews and a Lecturer in the Department of International Affairs at Qatar University. She completed her MA in International Relations in the Department of War Studies at King's College London and holds a BA in International Affairs with a concentration on Security Studies and Diplomacy from Qatar University. Her interests are in small state foreign policy, Gulf studies, public diplomacy, strategic narratives, and critical security studies. Her PhD research is titled "Small Gulf States and the Role of Strategic Narratives in their Foreign Policies".
This paper presents the role of strategic narratives in the foreign policy of small states. Strategic narratives are calculated storylines of events intended to shape perceptions, outcomes, and to an extent, policy. While strategic narratives have been utilised by many actors, their use by small states has been understudied. Within the traditional understanding of international relations, states are expected to abide by certain "natural" roles; small states, for example, are expected to join international institutions in order to regain some agency within a system that favours great, powerful states. However, the reality of international relations is not a well-ordered ecosystem of natural roles, but one of socially constructed roles through the interaction and communication of states with each other and other actors in the system. Using Qatar and the United Arab Emirates as case studies, this paper forms a theoretical framework suitable for examining the role the strategic narrative plays and through which small states attempt to construct self-identities and shape perceptions of issues and policies within the region and internationally.
PhD student in Political Science at Duke University. His research interests lie in normative political theory, constitutional law and jurisprudence, and education. Prior to Duke, he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in Political Science and Philosophy.
Contemporary democratic theory largely takes the formation of political citizens for granted. This elision is problematic given that democracy is the most cognitively demanding form of political organisation. If the strength of democracy relies on active, autonomous, and civically educated citizens, how might they be formed? Questions about education are not only technical questions, that is, questions about how to teach, but also moral and political questions about what should be taught, to whom, for what ends, and on what authority. Education is thus always political since it concerns the formation of the future generations. The aim of this paper is to consider the normative basis of education. Its primary task is to lay out an account that shows the democratic potential of education to show that democratic formation can take place in schools. The larger idea underlying the paper is that no one is born a democratic citizen — democratic formation takes hard work. Democratic institutions are therefore more likely to shape and form us to become more democratic.
Lecturer of Modern Languages at Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul. She holds an MA degree in Politics and International Studies with a specialisation in Eurasian Studies from Uppsala University, and a PhD in International Relations and Political Science from Yildiz Technical University. Her research interests are democratic transitions, civil-military relations, civil society, and Islam and politics in the MENA region. She has published on post-Arab Spring politics in Tunisia and Egypt, transitions from authoritarianism, political Islamist movements, and civil society in the Middle East. She is the author of Arab Spring-Arab Fall: Divergent Transitions in post-2011 Tunisia and Egypt (Lexington, 2021).
The Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey and Ennahda Party in Tunisia have gone through significant transformation both in their political rhetoric and the policies they have adopted. They have transcended the narrow boundaries of Islamism and have struggled to incorporate religiosity within the framework of modern civil state and to harmonise Islam with democracy. Due to this significant shift, these parties could be investigated within the framework "post-Islamism", a term coined by Asef Bayat. This paper delves into the varied experiences of these two prominent post-Islamist parties. Drawing on the individual experiences of the two parties, this article seeks to answer the following question: How do the post-Islamist parties diverge in terms of their ideology, discourse, and strategies with regard to democratisation in Tunisia and Turkey? It argues that the variations in the political trajectories of these countries are largely shaped by the parties' leadership styles, their understanding of democracy, intra-party politics, and the parties' strategic and tactical choices at critical times (e.g., coalition making, their approach to constitutional drafting, and choosing between presidential versus parliamentary systems). Thus, the paper aims to shed light on the relationship between post-Islamist parties and the course of democratisation or de-democratisation in Tunisia and Turkey in a comparative context.
PhD student and Graduate Teaching Fellow in the Political Science department at the University of Oregon. She holds an MA in Political Science, an MA in English Language Literature and Civilisation (Major American Civilisation), and a Graduate Certificate in Interfaith Dialogue. She is also a Graduate Student at the Graduate Certificate Program in New Media and Culture at the University of Oregon. She has a Graduate Certificate in Interfaith Dialogue and a CONTACT Certificate in Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation from SIT Graduate Institute, Vermont. She taught English, French, and Drama in Turkey, Poland, Tunisia, and the US. She is currently working on her dissertation research on the role of media and civil society in democratic backsliding in Tunisia and Hungary. Her academic interests are comparative politics and international relations. She is specifically interested in democratisation, democratic backsliding, religion, politics, media, civil society, US foreign policy, international relations, and politics of the MENA region.
Why do citizens support democratic backsliding? And how do elites' divergent understandings of democracy in nascent democracies influence the ability to prevent democratic backsliding and oppose it? Tunisia has been upheld as the exception in the Arab World for its successful democratisation. However, it has seen deliberate acts of democratic subversion despite its exceptional status. Polls show an overwhelming support for the president despite his acts of democratic subversion. Ethnographic evidence in the rural community of Vaga where the "yes" vote for the referendum was 80 percent shows that emotional voting, illiberal values, and the paradox of nostalgia and fear can explain the support for Kais Saied and his executive aggrandisement. Yet, the support is conditional and contested. Tunisians have not given up on key democratic practices. Also, elites' divergent understandings of democracy contribute to complacency with executive aggrandisement and fragmentation of the oppositions.
PhD student at the University of Warsaw and visiting doctoral researcher at the Middle East Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science. She completed internships at NATO's Political Affairs and Security Policy Division, Middle East and North Africa Section as well as in the National Security Bureau. Her research puts emphasis on analysing and deconstructing various levels and aspects of identity as one of the factors determining the stability of the state in the Middle East.
The paper analyses responses from interviews with 50 Iraqi supporters of the October revolution through the prism of a broader discourse on Iraqis' national self-identification and its significance for state stability. The concepts of the non-state [Lā Dawla] and desire for a homeland [Nurīdu Watan] have been central to protesters' rhetoric. With the expansion of the Westphalian order to the non-European world, embodied in the Wilsonian mandate ideal – Iraq of 1932, came the universalisation of sovereignty, which resulted in the internal instability of many postcolonial states, validating the claim that decolonisation meant the end of the empirical state. Designations of de facto sovereignty no longer had to accompany de jure sovereignty. So, for contemporary Iraqis, what constitutes a substantial difference between a state and a non-state, between a state and a homeland? There has been a prevailing notion of the dichotomic relation between a weak state and a strong society, then a strong state and a weak society which enables authoritarianism. In reality, this antinomy is flawed and not absolute. Iraqis' self-identification is understood as emancipation through the negotiation of meaning and the reflective relationship with the postcolonial state. The prefix "post" indicates not a time sequence but a certain continuum of consequences, a reflective and, indeed, reflexive relationship with the preceding era. Thus, the national identity of Iraqis is interwoven with the discourse of state legitimacy and civil society. For the interviewees, the protest became a performative ritual of citizenship emancipation.
Winter School