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. 

In a seminar hosted by the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Matthew Levitt, who directs the Washington Institute's Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, discussed the Middle East's changing strategic landscape through the lens of the 2026 Iran conflict. While Israel and the United States have achieved significant tactical successes against Hezbollah and the Houthis, Levitt argued, the countries have struggled in progressing the victories to long-term resolutions. He said state actors alone do not drive the region's conflict, but rather that proxy networks and aggressive public relations narratives hinder efforts towards stability.

Levitt then discussed the larger geopolitical effects of the conflict, including the shrinking chances for traditional peace agreements and increasingly negative international views of Israel after the October 7 attacks. He suggested that real changes in Israel’s global position would need political shifts and more transparency at home, while also noting the deep domestic doubts about solutions like a two-state framework. The discussion included the role of outside powers — especially China — in influencing regional dynamics through economic ties to Iran. He also touched on the likelihood that U.S.-Israel relations will increasingly shift from direct aid to joint investments in technology and defense.

As questions about democratic governance, institutional resilience, and authoritarian power become increasingly central to public life around the world, the need for rigorous, accessible scholarship has grown more urgent. Effective May 15, 2026, a new partnership between Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Journal of Democracy will expand Stanford’s role in those conversations. Through the partnership, CDDRL will support the production of the Journal’s quarterly print issues and expanding digital content, while creating new opportunities for faculty, researchers, and students to contribute to its work. 

Since 1990, the Journal of Democracy has served as a major forum for scholars, policymakers, democratic reformers, and public intellectuals examining how democracy emerges, endures, and comes under strain. Widely regarded as the leading global publication on democratic theory and practice, the Journal has played a central role in shaping debates on democracy worldwide. Previously, the Journal was housed within the National Endowment for Democracy — a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. The Journal was co-founded by Larry Diamond, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at CDDRL within the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), who served as founding co-editor for the Journal's first 32 years. 

A natural alignment with CDDRL’s work

The partnership is a natural fit for CDDRL, which brings scholarship and practice together to examine the forces that advance or impede representative governance, human development, and the rule of law. It also builds on long-standing connections between the center and the Journal of Democracy: many CDDRL-affiliated faculty have contributed to the Journal over the years, and its focus closely aligns with the center’s research, teaching, and practitioner training programs. Moreover, CDDRL is already deeply engaged in the kinds of questions the Journal has long brought to wide audiences — whether through the Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program, which brings civil society leaders from developing and transitioning countries to Stanford for intensive training in democratic practice and reform, the Democracy Action Lab’s work on democratic resilience, or the Leadership Academy for Development’s training for leaders advancing good governance and economic development.  

More broadly, the partnership reflects CDDRL’s research and teaching agenda, which focuses on the institutions, ideas, and political forces shaping democratic resilience, authoritarianism, and governance around the world. Across its faculty, fellows, students, and training programs, the center takes an interdisciplinary approach to some of the most pressing questions in global politics — from democratic backsliding and state capacity to political reform and accountability. The Journal of Democracy offers a complementary platform where that work can reach both academic and public audiences.

Connecting research to practice

For Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of CDDRL and the Satre Family Senior Fellow at FSI, the partnership highlights how CDDRL’s work connects research to the practical challenges facing democracy.

“One of CDDRL’s core strengths is the ability to take high-quality research theories and methods and apply them to on-the-ground policy challenges,” Stoner said. “The Journal of Democracy serves a similar function in the field of political development. Our new partnership to produce the Journal enhances our global reach in both the international development policy and academic communities.”

Lisa Blaydes is a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She is the author of State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Princeton University Press, 2018) and Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Professor Blaydes received the 2009 Gabriel Almond Award for best dissertation in the field of comparative politics from the American Political Science Association for this project. Her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Middle East Journal, and World Politics. During the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 academic years, Professor Blaydes was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD) from the University of California, Los Angeles, and International Relations (BA, MA) from Johns Hopkins University.

Below is a summary of our conversation.

Could you share your academic trajectory — what initially drew you to the field and how that led to your work at Stanford and CDDRL?

Professor Lisa Blaydes explained that her initial interest stemmed from a broad curiosity about how the world operates politically. Early on, she was drawn to international relations, but later realized that her interests aligned more closely with comparative politics than with international conflict or policy. Encouraged by a faculty mentor, Prof. Blaydes pursued a PhD in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she found a strong intellectual environment for comparative politics. Over time, her research interests evolved significantly, shaped both by academic exposure and later by experiences at Stanford University and a postdoctoral period at Harvard University.

Do students need to enter graduate school with clearly defined research interests? How did you navigate that process?

Prof. Blaydes emphasized that research interests are often shaped by the intellectual environment of graduate school rather than being fixed beforehand. In her case, the prominence of institutional analysis in the PhD program pushed research toward political institutions. Prof. Blaydes noted that research trajectories continue to evolve even at advanced career stages, both methodologically and theoretically.

Importantly, she highlighted that not knowing one’s exact research direction at the outset is not only acceptable but preferable. Many projects only became clear after engaging directly with fieldwork, archival research, or data collection. This allows research questions to emerge endogenously, reducing confirmation bias and enabling more grounded scholarship.