Amir Abdul Reda
Biographic Data
| ID | 4193714 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Amir Abdul Reda |
| GIVEN NAMES | Amir Abdul |
| FAMILY NAME | Reda |
| SIGNATURE | REDA A A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2044-7099 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The colonial origins of secularization: Historical pathways of economic elites and religiosity in the Middle East and North Africa
What is the impact of income on secularity? Why does higher income lead to greater secularity in some contexts but not others? I argue that the answer lies in the long-term political consequences of direct colonial rule. Challenging conventional wisdom on secularization, I advance a macro-historical account in which colonial intervention reshaped the social meaning of secularity among higher-income groups. In societies subjected to direct colonia…
Crisis governance and protest during the covid-19 pandemic in Europe: A conditional grievance theory
Why do some crisis-response policies trigger more protests than others? What does this reveal about how governments should introduce restrictive–but necessary–measures during times of crisis? This paper revisits prevailing explanations for protests against Covid-19 policies by proposing a conditional grievance theory of protest. We argue that the protest-inducing effect of containment measures depends not only on their restrictiveness, but also o…
More pressing matters: Can priority reorientation beat online misinformation
Mobilizing the Masses: Measuring Resource Mobilization on Twitter
How can we measure the resource mobilization (RM) efforts of social movements on Twitter? In this article, we create the first ever measure of social movements' RM efforts on a social media platform. To this aim, we create a four-conditional lexicon that can parse through tweets and identify those concerned with RM. We also create a simple RM score that can be plotted in a time series format to track the RM efforts of social movements in real tim…
Out of sight, out of mind: The impact of lockdown measures on sentiment towards refugees
How did COVID-19 related movement restrictions impact sentiment toward refugees? Existing theories offer conflicting answers. On the one hand, contact theories suggest that movement restrictions might reduce casual interactions with refugees, leading to less negative sentiments. On the other hand, integrated threat theories suggest refugees may be perceived as a security threat and blamed for these movement restrictions in the first place. To gau…
Does Social Mobility Matter? The Kafala System and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment
Existing studies argue that anti-immigrant sentiment stems from threat perception. Yet, conventional theoretical approaches cannot fully explain hostility toward immigrants in the Middle East and North Africa, where low-skilled foreign workers occupy an inferior social and legal status vis-a-vis natives under the kafala system. Building on existing studies of immigration politics, we theorize how immigration policies can either facilitate or prev…
Determinants of Arab public opinion on the Caliphate: Islamist elites, religiosity and socioeconomic conditions
What are the determinants of public opinion on the issue of the Caliphate in the Arab world? My answer to this question outlines the key role played by Islamist elites, religiosity and age in influencing Arab opinion on the issue of the Caliphate in three countries during the early Age of Islamism (1980s–1990s). I do so by using Binary Logistic Regression Models on observations that I found in survey data collected in 1988 in Egypt and Kuwait, an…
Political Culture in the Islamic World: The Socioeconomic Roots of the Islamic Leviathan
In this paper, the author explores how development affects public opinions on an Islamic Leviathan as an appropriate political system in the Middle East. He asks the following: In the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa), what influences political attitudes toward the Islamic Leviathan? To answer this question, he looks at the influence of seven independent variables on attitudes toward the Islamic Leviathan as a state system. The seven var…
Framing Political Islam: Syria's Muslim Brotherhood and the 2011 Uprising
Framing Political Islam: Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and the 2011 Uprising
What aspects of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood’s (a.k.a. the Ikhwan) cultural/ideological framing contributed to its failure to gather opponents of the Assad regime around its leadership during the 2011uprising? What does this reveal about why some Islamist political parties failed in situations of high political contention, such as the Syrian civil war? I argue that despite considerable evolution in the Syrian Brotherhood’s cultural/ideological f…
Mobilizing the Masses: Measuring Resource Mobilization on Twitter
How can we measure the resource mobilization (RM) efforts of social movements on Twitter? In this article, we create the first ever measure of social movements' RM efforts on a social media platform. To this aim, we create a four-conditional lexicon that can parse through tweets and identify those concerned with RM. We also create a simple RM score that can be plotted in a time series format to track the RM efforts of social movements in real tim…
Does Social Mobility Matter? The Kafala System and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment
Existing studies argue that anti-immigrant sentiment stems from threat perception. Yet, conventional theoretical approaches cannot fully explain hostility toward immigrants in the Middle East and North Africa, where low-skilled foreign workers occupy an inferior social and legal status vis-a-vis natives under the kafala system. Building on existing studies of immigration politics, we theorize how immigration policies can either facilitate or prev…
Out of sight, out of mind: The impact of lockdown measures on sentiment towards refugees
How did COVID-19 related movement restrictions impact sentiment toward refugees? Existing theories offer conflicting answers. On the one hand, contact theories suggest that movement restrictions might reduce casual interactions with refugees, leading to less negative sentiments. On the other hand, integrated threat theories suggest refugees may be perceived as a security threat and blamed for these movement restrictions in the first place. To gau…
Determinants of Arab public opinion on the Caliphate: Islamist elites, religiosity and socioeconomic conditions
What are the determinants of public opinion on the issue of the Caliphate in the Arab world? My answer to this question outlines the key role played by Islamist elites, religiosity and age in influencing Arab opinion on the issue of the Caliphate in three countries during the early Age of Islamism (1980s–1990s). I do so by using Binary Logistic Regression Models on observations that I found in survey data collected in 1988 in Egypt and Kuwait, an…
Framing Political Islam: Syria's Muslim Brotherhood and the 2011 Uprising
Framing Political Islam: Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and the 2011 Uprising
What aspects of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood’s (a.k.a. the Ikhwan) cultural/ideological framing contributed to its failure to gather opponents of the Assad regime around its leadership during the 2011uprising? What does this reveal about why some Islamist political parties failed in situations of high political contention, such as the Syrian civil war? I argue that despite considerable evolution in the Syrian Brotherhood’s cultural/ideological f…
Political Culture in the Islamic World: The Socioeconomic Roots of the Islamic Leviathan
In this paper, the author explores how development affects public opinions on an Islamic Leviathan as an appropriate political system in the Middle East. He asks the following: In the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa), what influences political attitudes toward the Islamic Leviathan? To answer this question, he looks at the influence of seven independent variables on attitudes toward the Islamic Leviathan as a state system. The seven var…
Determinants of Arab public opinion on the Caliphate: Islamist elites, religiosity and socioeconomic conditions
What are the determinants of public opinion on the issue of the Caliphate in the Arab world? My answer to this question outlines the key role played by Islamist elites, religiosity and age in influencing Arab opinion on the issue of the Caliphate in three countries during the early Age of Islamism (1980s–1990s). I do so by using Binary Logistic Regression Models on observations that I found in survey data collected in 1988 in Egypt and Kuwait, an…
Out of sight, out of mind: The impact of lockdown measures on sentiment towards refugees
How did COVID-19 related movement restrictions impact sentiment toward refugees? Existing theories offer conflicting answers. On the one hand, contact theories suggest that movement restrictions might reduce casual interactions with refugees, leading to less negative sentiments. On the other hand, integrated threat theories suggest refugees may be perceived as a security threat and blamed for these movement restrictions in the first place. To gau…
Does Social Mobility Matter? The Kafala System and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment
Existing studies argue that anti-immigrant sentiment stems from threat perception. Yet, conventional theoretical approaches cannot fully explain hostility toward immigrants in the Middle East and North Africa, where low-skilled foreign workers occupy an inferior social and legal status vis-a-vis natives under the kafala system. Building on existing studies of immigration politics, we theorize how immigration policies can either facilitate or prev…
Mobilizing the Masses: Measuring Resource Mobilization on Twitter
How can we measure the resource mobilization (RM) efforts of social movements on Twitter? In this article, we create the first ever measure of social movements' RM efforts on a social media platform. To this aim, we create a four-conditional lexicon that can parse through tweets and identify those concerned with RM. We also create a simple RM score that can be plotted in a time series format to track the RM efforts of social movements in real tim…
Crisis governance and protest during the covid-19 pandemic in Europe: A conditional grievance theory
Why do some crisis-response policies trigger more protests than others? What does this reveal about how governments should introduce restrictive–but necessary–measures during times of crisis? This paper revisits prevailing explanations for protests against Covid-19 policies by proposing a conditional grievance theory of protest. We argue that the protest-inducing effect of containment measures depends not only on their restrictiveness, but also o…
More pressing matters: Can priority reorientation beat online misinformation
The colonial origins of secularization: Historical pathways of economic elites and religiosity in the Middle East and North Africa
What is the impact of income on secularity? Why does higher income lead to greater secularity in some contexts but not others? I argue that the answer lies in the long-term political consequences of direct colonial rule. Challenging conventional wisdom on secularization, I advance a macro-historical account in which colonial intervention reshaped the social meaning of secularity among higher-income groups. In societies subjected to direct colonia…
Politics (8 works) · Political science (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Islam (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence (5 works) · Law (4 works) · Corporate governance (3 works) · Geography (3 works) · History (3 works)