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The Muslim Social: Neoliberalism, Poverty, and Charity in Turkey | Book Talk with Gizem Zencirci

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Gizem Zencirci

Since coming to power, Turkey’s governing party, the AKP has made poverty relief a central part of their political program. In addition to neoliberal reforms, AKP’s program has involved an emphasis on Islamic charity that is unprecedented in the history of the Turkish Republic. To understand the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, Gizem Zencirci introduces the concept of the Muslim Social, defined as a welfare regime that reimagined and reconfigured Islamic charitable practices to address the complex needs of a modern market society.

Through an in-depth ethnography of social service provision, in The Muslim Social: Neoliberalism, Charity, and Poverty in Turkey (Syracuse University Press, 2024), Zencirci demonstrates the blending of religious values and neoliberal elements in dynamic, flexible, and unexpected ways. Although these governmental assemblages of Islamic neoliberalism produced new forms of generosity, distinctive notions of poverty, and novel ways of relating to others in society, Zencirci’s analysis reveals how this welfare regime privileged managerial efficiency and emotional well-being at the expense of other objectives such as equality, development, or justice. The book provides a lens onto the everyday life of Islamic neoliberalism, while also mapping the kind of political concerns that animate poverty governance in our capitalist present.

Book talk co-sponsored the by Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, CDDRL's Program on Turkey, and the Middle Eastern Studies Forum.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Gizem Zencirci, PhD studies the cultural politics of neoliberalism in Turkey. Zencirci is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College. Her research interests include Islamic neoliberalism, civilizationism, heritage studies, and cultural economy. Her work has been published in journals such as the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the Journal of Cultural Economy.

In-person: Philippines Conference Room (Encina Hall, 3rd floor, 616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford)
Online: Via Zoom

Gizem Zencirci
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Malaina Kapoor

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CDDRL Honors Student, 2024-25
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Major: International Relations
Hometown: Redwood City, California 
Thesis Advisor: Abbas Milani

Tentative Thesis Title: From Kashf-e-Hijab to the Islamic Republic: Veiling, Unveiling, and State Power in Iran

Future aspirations post-Stanford: I participated in the Stanford in Washington program last fall and loved exploring the city, working in government, and learning from incredible mentors. I'd love to go back to D.C. after graduation and work at the intersection of foreign policy and women's rights.

A fun fact about yourself: I have been a competitive opera singer for twelve years!

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Book Talk with Güneş Murat Tezcür — Liminal Minorities: Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies

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Liminal Minorities: Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies | Book Talk with Güneş Murat Tezcür

Why do some religious minorities, lacking any significant power and presenting no imminent threat, provoke the ire of popular groups and become targets of violent attacks? Tezcür's book offers the first comparative-historical study of mass atrocities targeting certain liminal minorities that are stigmatized across generations, as they lack theological recognition and social acceptance from a dominant religious group. The combination of hatred based on religious stigmas and political resentment becomes the spark leading to mass violence against these minorities. Case studies, utilizing a rich variety of original sources, focus on anti-Yezidi genocidal attacks in Iraq and anti-Alevi massacres in Turkey.

This event is co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the Middle Eastern Studies Forum, and CDDRL's Program on Turkey.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Güneş Murat Tezcür (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2005) is the Director of the School of Politics and Global Studies at the Arizona State University. He is also a professor in the same school. He is primarily a scholar of darker shades of human experience and explores the trajectories and legacies of political violence and politics of identity with a focus on Iranian, Kurdish, and Turkish human geography as well as the United States. His scholarship has appeared in many leading scholarly journals. His newest book is Liminal Minorities: Religion and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies (Cornell University Press, 2024). He most recently edited The Oxford Handbook of Turkish Politics (Oxford University Press, 2022). His scholarship has been supported by a variety of entities including the National Science Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and United States Institute of Peace. 

Encina Commons Room 119
615 Crothers Way, Stanford

Güneş Murat Tezcür

Is Taliban 2.0 Closing the Gates to Ijtihad Again?

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After almost two years since the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan, the international community is coming to terms with the nature of the new regime in Kabul. This Article explores the nature of Taliban 2.0, assessing evidence of both change and disturbing continuity in the new leadership of Afghanistan. Importantly, Taliban 2.0 has demonstrated persistent inflexibility in its imposition of a puritanical form of Islamic rule, exemplified by its treatment of the rights of women and girls. This inflexibility is in direct conflict with its goal of becoming a formally recognized member of the international community. Its lack of international recognition hampers the Taliban's ability to stabilize the Afghan economy and provide even minimal levels of public goods to its people. Yet, in light of this growing humanitarian crisis, the United States and its allies face a delicate balancing act: decreasing the suffering of the Afghan people while maintaining pressure on the Taliban regime. This Article argues that the United States should consider using a mix of carrots and sticks to achieve this delicate balance and test the ultimate flexibility, cohesion, and staying power of Taliban 2.0.

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Stanford Journal of International Law
Authors
Erik Jensen
Kazumi Hoshino-MacDonald
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2, Summer 2023

ISIS in Iraq: The Social and Psychological Foundations of Terror

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ISIS in Iraq: The Social and Psychological Foundations of Terror

This study follows the human side of ISIS’s amazing rise and fall in Iraq. It does not do this as a battle-by-battle history of the group, but rather explores how common Iraqis viewed the group, interacted with the group, joined the group, fought in the group, and ultimately suffered under its brutal rule. Specifically, we seek to answer the following questions: What factors conditioned public support and opposition toward ISIS in Iraq? Why did some Iraqis move from passive support for the group to actively participating in the group’s activities, including fighting? This study uses a social psychological approach to understand the trajectory of ISIS in Iraq. The book argues that ISIS derived support from how it was perceived to either meet or threaten basic human needs for individual Iraqis. The three basic human needs in question are the physical needs for security and sustenance and the psychological need for a feeling of individual significance. Our analysis is based on a unique array of public opinion data from surveys, focus groups, and in-depth face-to-face interviews with forty detained ISIS foot soldiers and four senior leaders to explain why some Iraqis came to join and acquiesce to ISIS while others opposed it, why ISIS lost the hearts and minds of Iraqi Sunni Arabs, and how this contributed decidedly to its battlefield defeats.

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This book explores the social and psychological factors behind how ISIS was able to rise in Iraq, control most of it, and why most of that population eventually turned on it.

Authors
Munqith Dagher
Karl Kaltenthaler
Michele Gelfand
Arie Kruglanksi
Ian McCulloh
Book Publisher
Oxford University Press

Building resilient inter-ethnic peace: Hindus and Muslims in South Asia

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Building resilient inter-ethnic peace: Hindus and Muslims in South Asia

A key challenge that many nations face in the 21st century is to build societies that not only are able to peacefully accommodate increasing ethnic diversity but also to leverage its potential benefits. This is not a straightforward task. Ethnically diverse communities tend to provide fewer public goods to their citizens (e.g. Alesina et al. 2004, Alesina and La Ferrara 2005) and are less likely to voice common priorities (e.g. Ban et al. 2012). With ethnic identities often coordinating political competition as well, it is perhaps not surprising that violent conflict is more likely in ethnically polarised countries and regions (e.g. Montalvo and Reynal-Querol 2005, Esteban et al. 2012, Jha 2023 and Figure 1). With 82.1 million people around the world forcibly displaced due to persecution and conflict in 2020, and widespread economic migration, the challenge of building resilient inter-ethnic peace is one faced not only by societies that have been diverse historically but increasingly in nations and communities with less experience navigating a diverse setting.

What can economic theory, in combination with the historical experiences of these communities, tell us about the necessary conditions for resilient inter-ethnic peace, and how these can be fostered?


This book presents a synthesis of key recent advances in political-economy research on the various approaches and strategies used in the process of building nations throughout modern history. It features chapters written by leading scholars who describe the findings of their quantitative analyses of the risks and benefits of different nation-building policies. The book is comprised of 26 chapters organized into six sections, each focusing on a different aspect of nation-building. The first chapter presents a unified framework for assessing nation-building policies, highlights potential challenges that may arise, provides a summary of each of the other chapters, and draws out the main lessons from them. The following chapters delve into the importance of social interactions for national identification, the role of education, propaganda and leadership, external interventions and wars, and the effects of representation and redistribution. The book offers a nuanced understanding of effective nation-building policies.

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Chapter in Nation Building: Big Lessons from Successes and Failures, edited by Dominic Rohner and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

Authors
Saumitra Jha
Book Publisher
CEPR Press

Hicham Alaoui Examines Pact-Making in Middle East

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Hesham Sallam
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In a talk hosted by the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy on October 31, 2022, Hicham Alaoui, founder and director of the Hicham Alaoui Foundation, discussed his latest book – Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

During the event, co-sponsored by Stanford’s Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Center for African Studies, Alaoui presented a new theory for how democracy can materialize in the Middle East, and the broader Muslim world. He explained that one pathway to democratization lays not in resolving important, but often irreconcilable, debates about the role of religion in politics. Rather, it requires that Islamists and their secular opponents focus on the concerns of pragmatic survival—that is, compromise through pacting, rather than battling through difficult philosophical issues about faith.

You can purchase the book online, and watch a recording of the event below:

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To mark the 20th anniversary of the establishment of CDDRL, the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy (ARD) at CDDRL hosted a talk featuring Hicham Alaoui, founder and director of the Hicham Alaoui Foundation, who discussed his latest book – Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective

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Hicham Alaoui Pacted Democracy in the Middle East event

To mark the 20th anniversary of the establishment of CDDRL, Hicham Alaoui joins ARD to discuss his recently released book, Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Click here to order a copy of the book.

Pacted Democracy in the Middle East provides a new theory for how democracy can materialize in the Middle East, and the broader Muslim world. It shows that one pathway to democratization lays not in resolving important, but often irreconcilable, debates about the role of religion in politics. Rather, it requires that Islamists and their secular opponents focus on the concerns of pragmatic survival—that is, compromise through pacting, rather than battling through difficult philosophical issues about faith. This is the only book-length treatment of this topic, and one that aims to redefine the boundaries of an urgent problem that continues to haunt struggles for democracy in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

hicham alaoui
Hicham Alaoui is the founder and director of the Hicham Alaoui Foundation, which undertakes innovative social scientific research in the Middle East and North Africa. He is a scholar on the comparative politics of democratization and religion, with a focus on the MENA region.

In the past, he served as a visiting scholar and Consulting Professor at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at Stanford University.  He more recently served as postdoctoral fellow and research associate at Harvard University. He was also Regents Lecturer at several campuses of the University of California system. Outside of academia, he has worked with the United Nations in various capacities, such as the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. He has also worked with the Carter Center in its overseas missions on conflict resolution and democracy advancement. He has served on the MENA Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch and the Advisory Board of the Carnegie Middle East Center. He served on the board of the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University and has recently joined the Advisory Board of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard.

He holds an A.B. from Princeton University, M.A. from Stanford University, and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. His latest book is Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave, 2022). His memoirs, Journal d'un Prince Banni, were published in 2014 by Éditions Grasset, and have since been translated into several languages. He is also co-author with Robert Springborg of The Political Economy of Arab Education (Lynne Rienner, 2021), and co-author with the same colleague on the forthcoming volume Security Assistance in the Middle East: Challenges and the Need for Change (Lynne Rienner, 2023). His academic research has been widely published in various French and English journals, magazines, and newspapers of record.

This event is co-sponsored by ARD, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and the Center for African Studies at Stanford University.​

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Larry Diamond

In-person
Encina Commons Room 123
615 Crothers Way, Stanford, CA

Hicham Alaoui
Lectures
Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker Series

Classless Politics

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Classless Politics book cover

Since the 1970s, the Egyptian state has embarked on a far-reaching and destabilizing project of economic liberalization, reneging on its commitments to social welfare. Despite widespread socioeconomic grievances stemming from these policies, class politics and battles over wealth redistribution have largely been sidelined from elite-led national politics. Instead, conflicts over identity have raged, as Islamist movements became increasingly prominent political players.

Classless Politics offers a counterintuitive account of the relationship between neoliberal economics and Islamist politics in Egypt that sheds new light on the worldwide trend of “more identity, less class.” Hesham Sallam examines why Islamist movements have gained support at the expense of the left, even amid conflicts over the costs of economic reforms. Rather than highlighting the stagnancy of the left or the agility of Islamists, he pinpoints the historical legacies of authoritarian survival strategies. As the regime resorted to economic liberalization in the 1970s, it tacitly opened political space for Islamist movements to marginalize its leftist opponents. In the long run, this policy led to the fragmentation of opponents of economic reform, the increased salience of cultural conflicts within the left, and the restructuring of political life around questions of national and religious identity.

Historically rich and theoretically insightful, this book demonstrates how the participation of Islamist groups shapes the politics of neoliberal reform and addresses why economic liberalization since the 1970s has contributed to the surge in culture wars around the world today.

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Islamist Movements, the Left, and Authoritarian Legacies in Egypt

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Hesham Sallam
Book Publisher
Columbia University Press

Ahmed Ezzeldin Mohamed

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CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow, 2022-2023
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Ahmed Ezzeldin Mohamed is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law (CDDRL). He holds a Ph.D. (with distinction) in Political Science from Columbia University. He was a research fellow at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School in the academic year (2021-2022). He is a junior fellow of the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS).

Mohamed’s research focuses on the role of religion in political and economic development, with a special focus on the Middle East and the Muslim World. He utilizes a diverse set of tools for data collection and rigorous analysis. His work received several awards, including APSA 2022 Weber Best Conference Paper Award and MPSA 2019 Kellogg/Notre Dame Award for Best Paper in Comparative Politics. 

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