Sener Akturk
Biographic Data
| ID | 1262425 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sener Akturk |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sener |
| FAMILY NAME | Akturk |
| SIGNATURE | AKTURK S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Koç University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5897-6714 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 149 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The Puzzle of the Lithuanian-Polish Tatars
Social scientists have paid significant attention to the study of ethnic and religious minorities in Europe, and yet one group that evaded such scrutiny is the Tatars residing in modern-day Lithuania, Belarus, and Poland, who are unique in being Europe’s only Muslim community that survived under Catholic rule since the late medieval period. While Muslims in medieval and early modern France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were eradicated through a mix…
Faith of the Sovereign
Why could politicians of religious minority backgrounds become national leaders in some countries soon after modern representative institutions were adopted, whereas in some other countries, almost all the national leaders have been from the religious majority background for decades if not centuries? I argue that the most important factor explaining the incidence of national leaders of a religious minority background or lack thereof is whether th…
Religious Exclusion and the Origins of Democracy
The ongoing debate about democracy and diversity has been fruitful and thought-provoking but inconclusive because most scholars do not distinguish between ethnic, linguistic, racial, and religious diversity. The most challenging type of diversity for democracy past and present has been religious diversity. The first and the longest-lasting parliaments appeared in Western Europe with the eradication of all Jews and Muslims. The experience of Engla…
Not So Innocent
Sizeable Jewish and Muslim communities lived across large swathes of medieval Western Europe. But all the Muslim communities and almost all the Jewish communities in polities that correspond to present-day England, France, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were eradicated between 1064 and 1526. Most studies of ethnoreligious violence in Europe focus on communal, regional, and national political dynamics to explain its outbreak and variation. Re…
Why African Americans Do Not Rebel? How Hierarchic Integration Prevents Rebellion
Why African Americans do not rebel? Why is there no armed insurrection of African Americans across the USA, especially in cities and states where they make up almost half of the population? In many parts of the world, ethnic, racial, and religious groups that are much smaller in size, much less disadvantaged socioeconomically and politically, and with relatively fewer historical grievances than African Americans, launched armed insurrections that…
Nationalism and Religion in Comparative Perspective
Does religion motivate and intensify nationalism, or does religion moderate and even suppress nationalism? Six kinds of relationships between nationalism and religion are critically reviewed: nationalism as a modern religion in competition with traditional religions; religious origins of the “Chosen People” as the mythomoteur of nationalism; religious exclusion as nation-building; religious influences on national policies; influence of religious …
Turkey’s Grand Strategy and the Great Powers
How compatible is Turkey’s grand strategy with the grand strategies of global great powers? This article briefly summarizes principles of Turkish grand strategy, both from a descriptive and normative point of view, and then proceeds to outline and compare the grand strategies of five great powers that are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). While there are some observable conflicts between Turkey and the French, Russi…
Varieties of Resilience and Side Effects of Disobedience
The coronavirus pandemic allows us to test several hypotheses regarding state capacity and power by using a group of thirty-one Eurasian countries. These countries vary on a number of potentially relevant causal variables such as population density; proximity to the earliest epicenters of the pandemic; health spending; ethnoreligious diversity; dominant religious tradition; level of democracy; and the prevalence of smoking. We compare fatality ra…
Institutionalization of Ethnocultural Diversity and the Representation of European Muslims
We seek to explain variation in the descriptive representation of Muslim minorities in national legislatures, relying on an original data set that includes 635 seats filled by Muslim-origin MPs in the lower chambers of national parliaments of twenty-six European polities in three legislative cycles between 2007 and 2018. We argue that the image of a polity as a union of multiple ethnocultural groups, reflected in concrete state policies and insti…
The puzzle of Turkish minority representation, nationhood cleavage, and politics of recognition in Bulgaria, Greece, and North Macedonia
Bulgaria, Greece, and North Macedonia have demographically the largest and politically the most significant Turkish minorities in southeastern Europe. Yet the official recognition of Turkish ethnicity and language varies very significantly across these three neighbouring countries. This variation is particularly puzzling and counterintuitive if one considers a number of alternative explanations, all of which would predict different outcomes. The …
Comparative Politics of Exclusion in Europe and the Americas
Based on a critical reading of three recent books, I argue that the exclusion of Jews and Muslims, the two major non-Christian religious groups in Europe and the Americas, has continued on the basis of ethnic, racial, ideological, and quasi-rational justifications, instead of or in addition to religious justifications, since the Reformation. Furthermore, I argue that the institutionally orchestrated collective stigmatization and persecution of Je…
Relations between Russia and Turkey Before, During, and After the Failed Coup of 2016
States became an increasingly unreliable actor in the context of Turkey's fight against the PKK-PYD and the Glenists. Likewise, Russia's dependence on the Turkish Straits as its main supply route to its bases in Syria, Turkey's role as a key customer of Russian natural gas and grain, the goal of breaching Western economic sanctions, as well as consolidating Russia's internal security, all motivate Russia to seek closer relations with Turkey
One nation under Allah? Islamic multiculturalism, Muslim nationalism and Turkey’s reforms for Kurds, Alevis, and non-Muslims
A number of reforms and initiatives, undertaken by the Justice and Development Party (AKP or AK Party) governments in Turkey, widely known as Kurdish and Alevi ‘openings,’ and the less prominent non-Muslim (primarily Armenian and Jewish) openings, have puzzled scholars as to their causes, consequences, and limitations. In this article, I first briefly review four different kinds of analytical accounts that seek to explain the AK Party’s openings.…
Post-imperial democracies and new projects of nationhood in Eurasia
This article argues that Russia and Turkey radically reframed their projects of nation-building around the turn of the twenty-first century, and the migration patterns between the Caucasus, Central Asia, Middle East, Russia, and Turkey reinforce these new projects of nationhood, aimed at reshaping society and building a new collective identity. By focusing on the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, most studies of nationalism and nation-b…
Frederick F. Anscombe. State, Faith, and Nation in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Lands . New York
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Fourth Style of Politics
This article discusses the political origins, present-day significance, and implications of the intellectual movement known as “Eurasianism” in Turkey, a movement with Euroskeptic, anti-American, Russophile, neo-nationalist, secularist, and authoritarian tendencies, and including among its ranks socialists, nationalists, Kemalists, and Maoists. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Eurasianism emerged as a major intellectual movement in Tur…
Religion and Nationalism
Objectives Turkey, Algeria, and Pakistan have been persistently challenged, since their founding, by both Islamist and ethnic separatist movements. These challenges claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people in each country. I investigate the causes behind the concurrence of Islamist and ethnic separatist challenges to the state in Turkey, Algeria, and Pakistan. Method This research employs comparative historical analysis, and more specific…
Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey
Akturk discusses how the definition of being German, Soviet, Russian and Turkish radically changed at the turn of the twenty-first century. Germany's ethnic citizenship law, the Soviet Union's inscription of ethnic origins in personal identification documents and Turkey's prohibition on the public use of minority languages, all implemented during the early twentieth century, underpinned the definition of nationhood in these countries. Despite man…
Regimes of Ethnicity
How do state policies that regulate the relationship between ethnicity and nationality change? This article examines the dynamics of persistence and change in state policies toward ethnicity. In order to better comprehend the nature of political contestation over these state policies, the author first develops a new typology, “regimes of ethnicity,” and categorizes states as having monoethnic, multiethnic, and antiethnic regimes. These regimes ar…
Frank Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten
October 01 2010 Frank Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten: Juden im Sowjetstaat 1941–1953 Sener Akturk Sener Akturk Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Sener Akturk Online ISSN: 1531-3298 Print ISSN: 1520-3972 © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2010 Journal of Cold War Studies (2010) 12 (4): 205–207. https://doi.org/10.116…
Passport Identification and Nation-Building in Post-Soviet Russia
From 1934, ethnicity in the internal passport was a key feature of the USSR's ethnicity regime. Following Stalin's death, all attempts to abolish ethnicity from the Soviet internal passport failed. This article examines the removal of ethnicity from the internal passport in the post-Soviet period as a key indicator of the new state policy on ethnicity. Grounded in the scholarly literature on ethnicity in post-Soviet Russia, drawing on the media, …
Persistence of the Islamic Millet as an Ottoman Legacy
The definition of Turkish nationhood after the founding of the Republic has been evaluated and labelled very differently by various scholars. The classical view paralleled the official representation of Republican policies in describing Turkish nationhood as being based on a civic and territorial understanding of nationality. More recent and much more critical scholarship, which enjoys a near-hegemonic position in the study of Turkish nationalism…
Continuity and Change in the Regimes of Ethnicity in Austria, Germany, the USSR/Russia, and Turkey
After World War I, Austria, Germany, Russia, and Turkey moved from dynastic-imperial political regimes to quasi-republican regimes justified on the basis of popular legitimacy. Prior to this transition, in the management and political (in)significance of ethnic categories these empires broadly resembled each other. After World War I, the core successor states to these four empires pursued radically different policies in dealing with ethnicity as …
Incompatible Visions of Supra-Nationalism
This essay looks at Turkish-EU relations with a specific focus on identity narratives from the Turkish point of view. It outlines Turkey's official national narrative in its Ottoman, Turkic, and Islamic supra-national contexts and compares it with the supranational framework of EU member states' national narratives. According to the official Turkish historiography, Turkey is not part of a European family of nations. Turkey's non-European post-imp…
Turkish–Russian Relations after the Cold War (1992–2002)
This article examines the increasing and intensified cooperation between Russia and Turkey as a central feature of Central Eurasia’s post‐Cold War restructuring, and seeks to explain their cooperation with reference to major theories of international relations. It argues that the diminution of the Russian threat is what allowed for the possibility of Turkish–Russian cooperation
Regimes of Ethnicity
How do state policies that regulate the relationship between ethnicity and nationality change? This article examines the dynamics of persistence and change in state policies toward ethnicity. In order to better comprehend the nature of political contestation over these state policies, the author first develops a new typology, “regimes of ethnicity,” and categorizes states as having monoethnic, multiethnic, and antiethnic regimes. These regimes ar…
Persistence of the Islamic Millet as an Ottoman Legacy
The definition of Turkish nationhood after the founding of the Republic has been evaluated and labelled very differently by various scholars. The classical view paralleled the official representation of Republican policies in describing Turkish nationhood as being based on a civic and territorial understanding of nationality. More recent and much more critical scholarship, which enjoys a near-hegemonic position in the study of Turkish nationalism…
Institutionalization of Ethnocultural Diversity and the Representation of European Muslims
We seek to explain variation in the descriptive representation of Muslim minorities in national legislatures, relying on an original data set that includes 635 seats filled by Muslim-origin MPs in the lower chambers of national parliaments of twenty-six European polities in three legislative cycles between 2007 and 2018. We argue that the image of a polity as a union of multiple ethnocultural groups, reflected in concrete state policies and insti…
One nation under Allah? Islamic multiculturalism, Muslim nationalism and Turkey’s reforms for Kurds, Alevis, and non-Muslims
A number of reforms and initiatives, undertaken by the Justice and Development Party (AKP or AK Party) governments in Turkey, widely known as Kurdish and Alevi ‘openings,’ and the less prominent non-Muslim (primarily Armenian and Jewish) openings, have puzzled scholars as to their causes, consequences, and limitations. In this article, I first briefly review four different kinds of analytical accounts that seek to explain the AK Party’s openings.…
Passport Identification and Nation-Building in Post-Soviet Russia
From 1934, ethnicity in the internal passport was a key feature of the USSR's ethnicity regime. Following Stalin's death, all attempts to abolish ethnicity from the Soviet internal passport failed. This article examines the removal of ethnicity from the internal passport in the post-Soviet period as a key indicator of the new state policy on ethnicity. Grounded in the scholarly literature on ethnicity in post-Soviet Russia, drawing on the media, …
The puzzle of Turkish minority representation, nationhood cleavage, and politics of recognition in Bulgaria, Greece, and North Macedonia
Bulgaria, Greece, and North Macedonia have demographically the largest and politically the most significant Turkish minorities in southeastern Europe. Yet the official recognition of Turkish ethnicity and language varies very significantly across these three neighbouring countries. This variation is particularly puzzling and counterintuitive if one considers a number of alternative explanations, all of which would predict different outcomes. The …
Turkish–Russian Relations after the Cold War (1992–2002)
This article examines the increasing and intensified cooperation between Russia and Turkey as a central feature of Central Eurasia’s post‐Cold War restructuring, and seeks to explain their cooperation with reference to major theories of international relations. It argues that the diminution of the Russian threat is what allowed for the possibility of Turkish–Russian cooperation
Nationalism and Religion in Comparative Perspective
Does religion motivate and intensify nationalism, or does religion moderate and even suppress nationalism? Six kinds of relationships between nationalism and religion are critically reviewed: nationalism as a modern religion in competition with traditional religions; religious origins of the “Chosen People” as the mythomoteur of nationalism; religious exclusion as nation-building; religious influences on national policies; influence of religious …
The Fourth Style of Politics
This article discusses the political origins, present-day significance, and implications of the intellectual movement known as “Eurasianism” in Turkey, a movement with Euroskeptic, anti-American, Russophile, neo-nationalist, secularist, and authoritarian tendencies, and including among its ranks socialists, nationalists, Kemalists, and Maoists. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Eurasianism emerged as a major intellectual movement in Tur…
Religion and Nationalism
Objectives Turkey, Algeria, and Pakistan have been persistently challenged, since their founding, by both Islamist and ethnic separatist movements. These challenges claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people in each country. I investigate the causes behind the concurrence of Islamist and ethnic separatist challenges to the state in Turkey, Algeria, and Pakistan. Method This research employs comparative historical analysis, and more specific…
Not So Innocent
Sizeable Jewish and Muslim communities lived across large swathes of medieval Western Europe. But all the Muslim communities and almost all the Jewish communities in polities that correspond to present-day England, France, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were eradicated between 1064 and 1526. Most studies of ethnoreligious violence in Europe focus on communal, regional, and national political dynamics to explain its outbreak and variation. Re…
Post-imperial democracies and new projects of nationhood in Eurasia
This article argues that Russia and Turkey radically reframed their projects of nation-building around the turn of the twenty-first century, and the migration patterns between the Caucasus, Central Asia, Middle East, Russia, and Turkey reinforce these new projects of nationhood, aimed at reshaping society and building a new collective identity. By focusing on the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, most studies of nationalism and nation-b…
Comparative Politics of Exclusion in Europe and the Americas
Based on a critical reading of three recent books, I argue that the exclusion of Jews and Muslims, the two major non-Christian religious groups in Europe and the Americas, has continued on the basis of ethnic, racial, ideological, and quasi-rational justifications, instead of or in addition to religious justifications, since the Reformation. Furthermore, I argue that the institutionally orchestrated collective stigmatization and persecution of Je…
Continuity and Change in the Regimes of Ethnicity in Austria, Germany, the USSR/Russia, and Turkey
After World War I, Austria, Germany, Russia, and Turkey moved from dynastic-imperial political regimes to quasi-republican regimes justified on the basis of popular legitimacy. Prior to this transition, in the management and political (in)significance of ethnic categories these empires broadly resembled each other. After World War I, the core successor states to these four empires pursued radically different policies in dealing with ethnicity as …
Why African Americans Do Not Rebel? How Hierarchic Integration Prevents Rebellion
Why African Americans do not rebel? Why is there no armed insurrection of African Americans across the USA, especially in cities and states where they make up almost half of the population? In many parts of the world, ethnic, racial, and religious groups that are much smaller in size, much less disadvantaged socioeconomically and politically, and with relatively fewer historical grievances than African Americans, launched armed insurrections that…
Varieties of Resilience and Side Effects of Disobedience
The coronavirus pandemic allows us to test several hypotheses regarding state capacity and power by using a group of thirty-one Eurasian countries. These countries vary on a number of potentially relevant causal variables such as population density; proximity to the earliest epicenters of the pandemic; health spending; ethnoreligious diversity; dominant religious tradition; level of democracy; and the prevalence of smoking. We compare fatality ra…
Islam in Russia
Turkish–Russian Relations after the Cold War (1992–2002)
This article examines the increasing and intensified cooperation between Russia and Turkey as a central feature of Central Eurasia’s post‐Cold War restructuring, and seeks to explain their cooperation with reference to major theories of international relations. It argues that the diminution of the Russian threat is what allowed for the possibility of Turkish–Russian cooperation
Between Aristotle and the Welfare State
William Booth's 'On the Idea of the Moral Economy' (1994) is a scathing critique of the economic historians labelled as 'moral economists', chief among them Karl Polanyi, whose The Great Transformation is the groundwork for much of the later theorizing on the subject. The most devastating of Booth's criticisms is the allegation that Polanyi's normative prescriptions have anti-democratic, Aristotelian and aristocratic undertones for being guided b…
Continuity and Change in the Regimes of Ethnicity in Austria, Germany, the USSR/Russia, and Turkey
After World War I, Austria, Germany, Russia, and Turkey moved from dynastic-imperial political regimes to quasi-republican regimes justified on the basis of popular legitimacy. Prior to this transition, in the management and political (in)significance of ethnic categories these empires broadly resembled each other. After World War I, the core successor states to these four empires pursued radically different policies in dealing with ethnicity as …
Incompatible Visions of Supra-Nationalism
This essay looks at Turkish-EU relations with a specific focus on identity narratives from the Turkish point of view. It outlines Turkey's official national narrative in its Ottoman, Turkic, and Islamic supra-national contexts and compares it with the supranational framework of EU member states' national narratives. According to the official Turkish historiography, Turkey is not part of a European family of nations. Turkey's non-European post-imp…
Persistence of the Islamic Millet as an Ottoman Legacy
The definition of Turkish nationhood after the founding of the Republic has been evaluated and labelled very differently by various scholars. The classical view paralleled the official representation of Republican policies in describing Turkish nationhood as being based on a civic and territorial understanding of nationality. More recent and much more critical scholarship, which enjoys a near-hegemonic position in the study of Turkish nationalism…
Frank Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten
October 01 2010 Frank Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten: Juden im Sowjetstaat 1941–1953 Sener Akturk Sener Akturk Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Sener Akturk Online ISSN: 1531-3298 Print ISSN: 1520-3972 © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2010 Journal of Cold War Studies (2010) 12 (4): 205–207. https://doi.org/10.116…
Passport Identification and Nation-Building in Post-Soviet Russia
From 1934, ethnicity in the internal passport was a key feature of the USSR's ethnicity regime. Following Stalin's death, all attempts to abolish ethnicity from the Soviet internal passport failed. This article examines the removal of ethnicity from the internal passport in the post-Soviet period as a key indicator of the new state policy on ethnicity. Grounded in the scholarly literature on ethnicity in post-Soviet Russia, drawing on the media, …
Regimes of Ethnicity
How do state policies that regulate the relationship between ethnicity and nationality change? This article examines the dynamics of persistence and change in state policies toward ethnicity. In order to better comprehend the nature of political contestation over these state policies, the author first develops a new typology, “regimes of ethnicity,” and categorizes states as having monoethnic, multiethnic, and antiethnic regimes. These regimes ar…
Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey
Akturk discusses how the definition of being German, Soviet, Russian and Turkish radically changed at the turn of the twenty-first century. Germany's ethnic citizenship law, the Soviet Union's inscription of ethnic origins in personal identification documents and Turkey's prohibition on the public use of minority languages, all implemented during the early twentieth century, underpinned the definition of nationhood in these countries. Despite man…
Frederick F. Anscombe. State, Faith, and Nation in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Lands . New York
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Fourth Style of Politics
This article discusses the political origins, present-day significance, and implications of the intellectual movement known as “Eurasianism” in Turkey, a movement with Euroskeptic, anti-American, Russophile, neo-nationalist, secularist, and authoritarian tendencies, and including among its ranks socialists, nationalists, Kemalists, and Maoists. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Eurasianism emerged as a major intellectual movement in Tur…
Religion and Nationalism
Objectives Turkey, Algeria, and Pakistan have been persistently challenged, since their founding, by both Islamist and ethnic separatist movements. These challenges claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people in each country. I investigate the causes behind the concurrence of Islamist and ethnic separatist challenges to the state in Turkey, Algeria, and Pakistan. Method This research employs comparative historical analysis, and more specific…
Post-imperial democracies and new projects of nationhood in Eurasia
This article argues that Russia and Turkey radically reframed their projects of nation-building around the turn of the twenty-first century, and the migration patterns between the Caucasus, Central Asia, Middle East, Russia, and Turkey reinforce these new projects of nationhood, aimed at reshaping society and building a new collective identity. By focusing on the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, most studies of nationalism and nation-b…
One nation under Allah? Islamic multiculturalism, Muslim nationalism and Turkey’s reforms for Kurds, Alevis, and non-Muslims
A number of reforms and initiatives, undertaken by the Justice and Development Party (AKP or AK Party) governments in Turkey, widely known as Kurdish and Alevi ‘openings,’ and the less prominent non-Muslim (primarily Armenian and Jewish) openings, have puzzled scholars as to their causes, consequences, and limitations. In this article, I first briefly review four different kinds of analytical accounts that seek to explain the AK Party’s openings.…
Relations between Russia and Turkey Before, During, and After the Failed Coup of 2016
States became an increasingly unreliable actor in the context of Turkey's fight against the PKK-PYD and the Glenists. Likewise, Russia's dependence on the Turkish Straits as its main supply route to its bases in Syria, Turkey's role as a key customer of Russian natural gas and grain, the goal of breaching Western economic sanctions, as well as consolidating Russia's internal security, all motivate Russia to seek closer relations with Turkey
The puzzle of Turkish minority representation, nationhood cleavage, and politics of recognition in Bulgaria, Greece, and North Macedonia
Bulgaria, Greece, and North Macedonia have demographically the largest and politically the most significant Turkish minorities in southeastern Europe. Yet the official recognition of Turkish ethnicity and language varies very significantly across these three neighbouring countries. This variation is particularly puzzling and counterintuitive if one considers a number of alternative explanations, all of which would predict different outcomes. The …
Comparative Politics of Exclusion in Europe and the Americas
Based on a critical reading of three recent books, I argue that the exclusion of Jews and Muslims, the two major non-Christian religious groups in Europe and the Americas, has continued on the basis of ethnic, racial, ideological, and quasi-rational justifications, instead of or in addition to religious justifications, since the Reformation. Furthermore, I argue that the institutionally orchestrated collective stigmatization and persecution of Je…
Turkey’s Grand Strategy and the Great Powers
How compatible is Turkey’s grand strategy with the grand strategies of global great powers? This article briefly summarizes principles of Turkish grand strategy, both from a descriptive and normative point of view, and then proceeds to outline and compare the grand strategies of five great powers that are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). While there are some observable conflicts between Turkey and the French, Russi…
Varieties of Resilience and Side Effects of Disobedience
The coronavirus pandemic allows us to test several hypotheses regarding state capacity and power by using a group of thirty-one Eurasian countries. These countries vary on a number of potentially relevant causal variables such as population density; proximity to the earliest epicenters of the pandemic; health spending; ethnoreligious diversity; dominant religious tradition; level of democracy; and the prevalence of smoking. We compare fatality ra…
Institutionalization of Ethnocultural Diversity and the Representation of European Muslims
We seek to explain variation in the descriptive representation of Muslim minorities in national legislatures, relying on an original data set that includes 635 seats filled by Muslim-origin MPs in the lower chambers of national parliaments of twenty-six European polities in three legislative cycles between 2007 and 2018. We argue that the image of a polity as a union of multiple ethnocultural groups, reflected in concrete state policies and insti…
Nationalism and Religion in Comparative Perspective
Does religion motivate and intensify nationalism, or does religion moderate and even suppress nationalism? Six kinds of relationships between nationalism and religion are critically reviewed: nationalism as a modern religion in competition with traditional religions; religious origins of the “Chosen People” as the mythomoteur of nationalism; religious exclusion as nation-building; religious influences on national policies; influence of religious …
Why African Americans Do Not Rebel? How Hierarchic Integration Prevents Rebellion
Why African Americans do not rebel? Why is there no armed insurrection of African Americans across the USA, especially in cities and states where they make up almost half of the population? In many parts of the world, ethnic, racial, and religious groups that are much smaller in size, much less disadvantaged socioeconomically and politically, and with relatively fewer historical grievances than African Americans, launched armed insurrections that…
Not So Innocent
Sizeable Jewish and Muslim communities lived across large swathes of medieval Western Europe. But all the Muslim communities and almost all the Jewish communities in polities that correspond to present-day England, France, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were eradicated between 1064 and 1526. Most studies of ethnoreligious violence in Europe focus on communal, regional, and national political dynamics to explain its outbreak and variation. Re…
Faith of the Sovereign
Why could politicians of religious minority backgrounds become national leaders in some countries soon after modern representative institutions were adopted, whereas in some other countries, almost all the national leaders have been from the religious majority background for decades if not centuries? I argue that the most important factor explaining the incidence of national leaders of a religious minority background or lack thereof is whether th…
Political science (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Politics (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Law (17 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Turkey's Politics and Society (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Turkish (9 works)