In a CDDRL research seminar held on May 21, 2026, Alice Evans, a Senior Lecturer at the Stanford King Center for Global Development, presented her research exploring the causes of the global Islamic revival. To understand this transformation, she conducted qualitative research across nearly every world region, living with families and communities in countries including Indonesia, Morocco, Turkey, Uzbekistan, India, and across West Africa. 

Evans explores several competing theories for the global Islamic revival, beginning with past religious authoritarianism and Arab prestige bias. Past religious authoritarianism is the belief that historical Islamic empires consolidated political authority by empowering clerics and religious institutions, creating systems in which rulers derived legitimacy through religion. Similarly, Arab prestige bias argues that the religious prestige of places like Mecca and Medina drew Muslims across the world to follow religious practices associated with the Arab Islamic heartland.  However, Evans argues that these explanations alone cannot fully explain the global Islamic revival, as both Arab religious prestige and religious authoritarian traditions existed long before the revival began in the 1970s. 

The second major explanation discussed by scholars is historical contingencies, including geopolitical conflict and Saudi-funded Wahhabism. Geopolitical conflicts such as the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the post-9/11 War on Terror intensified a sense of global Muslim solidarity and reinforced an “us versus them” worldview. Similarly, Saudi-funded Wahhabism explains the revival through Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth, which allowed the kingdom to fund mosques, madrasas, scholarships, and religious education programs across the Muslim world. However, Evans argues that these explanations still cannot fully account for the revival because geopolitical conflict does not explain why the shift manifested specifically through religiosity, veiling, and gender segregation, while reformist Islamic movements also emerged independently outside of Saudi influence in places such as Egypt, India, and West Africa. 

Consequently, Evans argues that modernization played the most important role in the global spread of the Islamic revival. As highlighted throughout the seminar, technological advances such as steamships, print media, radio, television, and the internet enabled Muslims around the world to gain greater access to religious knowledge, leading to deeper engagement with Islamic scholarship and religious networks. This process was further strengthened through expanded mass schooling and increased state spending on religious education. 

This ultimately leads to Evans’ central theory, the “Prestige-Piety Feedback Loop,” which argues that modernization amplifies whichever moral systems command prestige within a society. In Muslim-majority societies, greater access to religious education and communication technologies leads to greater trust in religious authorities and increased social importance of visible piety, including practices such as veiling and gender segregation. Evans emphasizes that these practices are reinforced through community social pressure, particularly in large religious communities where individuals are constantly evaluated based on visible signs of piety. Consequently, modernization strengthened transnational Islamic identity and reinforced religious norms across the Muslim community. 

On September 25, 2025, FSI Senior Fellow Claire Adida presented her team’s research at a CDDRL Research Seminar Series talk under the title, “Overcoming Barriers to Women’s Political Participation: Evidence from Nigeria.” The seminar addressed a central paradox in global politics: although women’s legal formal right to vote is nearly universal, deep gender gaps remain in informal forms of political participation, such as contacting a local government official or attending a community meeting. This lack of engagement means women’s voices are underrepresented in governance and policies are less likely to reflect their priorities. This is particularly salient in hybrid democracies, where informal political participation may matter more than casting a vote.

Adida situated the study in the context of Nigeria, a large and diverse democracy that remains heavily patriarchal. Surveys highlight these disparities starkly: nearly half of Nigerian men believe men make better leaders than women; two in five women report never discussing politics with friends or family; and women are consistently less likely than men to attend meetings or contact community leaders. Against this backdrop, the project tested interventions designed to reduce barriers that discourage women’s participation.

The research team identified three categories of constraints: resource-based (a lack of time, skills, or information), norms-based (social expectations that women should remain outside the public sphere), and psychological (feelings of disempowerment and doubt about one’s capacity to create change). The study focused on the last two. To explore these, the team partnered with ActionAid Nigeria to conduct a randomized control trial (RCT) across 450 rural wards in three southwestern states. Local leaders identified groups of economically active women, aged 21 to 50, who were permitted by their spouses to join.

All communities began with an informational session on local governance. Beyond that, two types of training were introduced. The first, targeted at women, consisted of five sessions over five months designed to build leadership, organizing, and advocacy skills. These emphasized group-based learning and aimed to foster collective efficacy — the belief that a group can act together to achieve change. The second, targeted at men, encouraged husbands to act as allies in supporting women’s participation. After the initial informational session, communities were randomly assigned to no longer receive further training, to receive the 5 sessions of women’s training, or to receive the 5 sessions of women’s training and the 5 sessions of men’s training.

The findings were striking. Women’s trainings had clear positive effects: participants were more likely to engage in politics, attend meetings, and contact local leaders. The quality of their participation also improved, suggesting greater confidence and effectiveness. There was also evidence that these women’s trainings activated collective and self-efficacy, lending credence to the Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA), a framework explaining how a sense of shared identity, group-based injustice, and group efficacy build political engagement. By contrast, men’s trainings produced modest results. They did not increase women’s participation beyond the women’s trainings and, in some cases, had small negative effects, such as on grant applications. Still, men’s trainings reduced opposition to women’s involvement, improved beliefs about women in leadership, and increased perceptions of more permissive community norms, even if they did not translate into an increase in women’s political participation.

Adida noted that these limited effects may reflect “ceiling effects” — many men in the sample were already relatively supportive compared to national averages, or lower attendance rates. It is also possible that changes in men’s attitudes take longer to manifest in behavior. The seminar concluded that advocacy trainings for women show strong promise in boosting participation, while efforts to reshape patriarchal norms among men may require longer-term strategies.

When it comes to managing the administrative tasks that are required to run a home and raise a family, women bear the brunt of the responsibility. According to one study of women in the United States, mothers take on 7 out of 10 so-called mental load tasks, which range from planning meals to scheduling activities for children.

All that extra work takes a toll, including on society: Women who carry more mental load are less interested in national politics (men who carry more mental load also report less political interest, but fewer men are in that position).

Read the full story in the Stanford Report.

Sheryl Sandberg, former Chief Operating Officer of Meta and founder of LeanIn.org — an NGO dedicated to empowering women and girls — told a Stanford audience that the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks and sexual violence against women drew her back to the spotlight with a message for the world:

“What is at stake is actually important for all of humanity,” she said at a Nov. 19 film screening of her documentary, Screams Before Silence. The event was hosted by the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program, housed at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and Hillel at Stanford.

The film included eyewitness accounts from released hostages, survivors, and first responders. During the Hamas attacks on Israeli towns and at the Nova Music Festival, women and girls were raped, assaulted, mutilated, and killed. Released hostages have revealed that Israeli captives in Gaza have also been sexually assaulted.

Yet, as Sandberg noted, the atrocities have received little scrutiny or attention from human rights and feminist groups, international organizations, and others. Some denialists have even said Hamas’ sexual violence never took place or that it was invented by Israel itself — an echo of 9/11 denialism and antisemitic conspiracy theories. So, Sandberg undertook the challenge of creating a 60-minute documentary, which has now registered almost three million YouTube views while also being screened around the world.

‘Make people see this’

Sandberg interviewed survivors and witnesses and survivors and traveled to the site of the Nova Music Festival, where 364, mostly young revelers, were murdered in the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history. She viewed hundreds of photos of dead bodies of women who displayed clear signs of sexual abuse and harm.

She noted that even war has rules of law and that what she discovered while making the film was often incomprehensible, tragic, and heartbreaking.

Rape should never be used as an act of war, she said, and silence is complicity. “We know we have to keep fighting and trying to make people see this.”