Born in the aftermath of World War II, the State of Israel has undergone remarkable development as a nation over the past 75 years, oscillating between periods of war and strained peace while building a vibrant multiethnic society, economy, and technology sector. Taught by Larry Diamond (Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and professor, by courtesy, of sociology and of political science) and Amichai Magen (visiting professor and fellow in Israel Studies at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies), this 10-week online course will offer an informed analysis of modern Israel. Each week, the professors will be joined by Stanford experts and other guest speakers who will analyze important dimensions of Israeli life.

This course will inevitably dedicate time to the ongoing Middle East conflict, which again exploded into violence last October, and to the continuing efforts to find a formula for Israeli-Palestinian peace. In this context, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will discuss the emerging dynamics of geopolitics in the Middle East, and former Palestinian negotiator Ghaith al-Omari and Ambassador Dennis Ross will explore options for Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. In addition, Israeli author Yossi Klein Halevi will revisit his New York Times bestselling book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, in light of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack and the subsequent Gaza war. But the course will also look beyond the conflict, venturing into other lesser-known areas of Israeli life and history, including lectures on the politics of historical memory in divided societies with Stanford professor of history James T. Campbell, and Zionism and anti-Zionism with Stanford professor of the humanities Russell Berman. UC Berkeley School of Law professor Masua Sagiv will discuss the constitutional questions central to Israel’s effort to have a Jewish and democratic state. As we proceed, Sophia Khalifa Shramko will share the experience of growing up as an Arab woman in Israel. Finally, Stanford professor of economics Ran Abramitzky and Stanford visiting professor Alon Tal will explore Israel’s modern economy and efforts to use innovation to achieve sustainability in an environmentally challenging region. 

Please note: There are no formal prerequisites for this course, though prior interest and engagement with topics related to Israel and the Middle East are an advantage. This course is co-sponsored by Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and it is an adaptation of a class offered to Stanford undergraduates.

Why do politicians belonging to religious minorities attain the highest political offices in some countries but not others? Koç University Professor of International Relations Şener Aktürk presented his research on the subject in a CDDRL research seminar series talk. 

A key element in shaping this outcome, Aktürk argued, is the configuration of a given nation’s constitutive conflict, which often takes the form of wars of independence or civil wars.  If the primary adversary in this conflict is of a different religion, he explained, the majority religion will likely be closely associated with national identity. However, in cases where that adversary is of the same religious sect, religious identity will end up becoming less central in the formation of national identity. Accordingly, it will become easier for religious minority politicians to assume leadership afterward.  If the majority religion is nationally institutionalized — which generally coincides with constitutive conflict structured along religious lines – it will likely be difficult for minority politicians to rise through the ranks. 

To illustrate this pattern, Aktürk reviewed the religious affiliation of chief executives across various countries. In the United Kingdom, whose constitutive conflict pitted Protestants against Catholics — and resulted in a Protestant victory — every Prime Minister from 1721 through 2021 was Protestant. Any claimed exceptions converted are a telling sign. Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim religious minorities had their first representatives, or “pioneers,” in the House of Commons by affiliating with the left, demonstrating that left-liberalism was their entry point into politics. 

In Catholic France, where the constitutive conflict was internal (French Revolution), there were 5 Protestant Prime Ministers, with the first one elected within the first 50 years of the Third Republic, when the new republican regime consolidated. A Jewish Prime Minister was reelected three times. The left represented politicians of minority religions, whereas the right represented those of the core group. 

In Hungary, the formative conflict consisted of Catholics fighting against each other. This has allowed Protestant minority leaders to claim they are more nationalistic than their Catholic counterparts, who were presumably forced to pick between their nation and religion. A similar story holds in Italy, the first country to have a Jewish Prime Minister. 

Germany is the most unique case, as it experienced a change in constitutive conflict. Following the Franco-Prussian War, Germany was majority Protestant, with state persecution of the Catholic minority. However, a bloodier and more traumatic constitutive conflict replaced the first one — the Holocaust and World War II. Under Hitler, who was of Austrian Catholic origin, German nationalism ceased to be a Protestant-led movement.

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: