C Kurzman
Biographic Data
| ID | 52907 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Kurzman |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Kurzman |
| SIGNATURE | KURZMAN C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4290-0819 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 595 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
The Cold War against the Cold War
The strange career of Millian methods in comparative social science
For half a century, comparative social science has been closely associated with John Stuart Mill's methods of comparison. However, few social scientists had heard of Mill's methods in 1970. Within a decade, the methods of agreement and difference had become part of the methodological canon-despite Mill's objections that these methods should under no circumstances be used in the social sciences. Comparativists continued to overlook the methods tha…
The Self-Orientalizing Republic of Iran
On September 13, 2022, a young Kurdish Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini, known to her family as Jina, entered a police station in Tehran, under detention for not sufficiently covering her hair with a headscarf. Within hours, Amini was transferred from the police station to a nearby hospital in a coma. At the hospital, her family told journalists that she had been beaten by law enforcement officers. When Amini died on September 16, 2022, demonstrat…
The Globalization of Social Forces
Women's Assessments of Gender Equality
Women's assessments of gender equality do not consistently match global indices of gender inequality. In surveys covering 150 countries, women in societies rated gender-unequal according to global metrics such as education, health, labor-force participation, and political representation did not consistently assess their lives as less in their control or less satisfying than men did. Women in these societies were as likely as women in index-equal …
Who Doesn't Want Democracy? A Multilevel Analysis of Elite and Mass Attitudes
Despite its global rise in popularity, a significant number of people still oppose democracy. The current study evaluates three competing theories of opposition to democracy-developmentalist, culturalist, and elitist - using a series of multi-level regression models that combine individualand country-level variables. Results of our statistical analyses suggest that: 1) country-level indicators of social, political, and economic development are no…
Sociologies of Islam
The sociology of Islam arguably emerged in the fourteenth century with the work of Ibn Khaldun, but the term itself appeared first in 1931. In recent years, the field has expanded to encompass the study of all aspects of the social lives of the world's Muslims, who constitute one-fifth of the global population-hence the plural label, sociologies of Islam. This article reviews four central debates in the field: approaches to Muslim modernities, ch…
The Missing Martyrs: Why Are There So Few Muslim Terrorists?
Why are there so few Muslim terrorists? With more than a billion Muslims in the world—many of whom supposedly hate the West and ardently desire martyrdom—why don’t we see terrorist attacks every day? Where are the missing martyrs? Such questions may seem counterintuitive, in light of the death and devastation that terrorists have wrought around the world. But the scale of violence, outside of several civil war zones, has been far lower than the w…
Ideology and Threat Assessment: Law Enforcement Evaluation of Muslim and Right-Wing Extremism
Does ideology affect assessment of the threat of violent extremism? A survey of law enforcement agencies in the United States in 2014 offers a comparison suggesting a small but statistically significant effect: Political attitudes were correlated with assessment of threats posed by Muslim extremists, and threat assessment was not correlated with the number of Muslim Americans who had engaged in violent extremism within the agency's jurisdiction. …
Scholarly attention and the limited internationalization of US social science
What parts of the world does American social science consider worthy of scholarly attention? Analyzing the geographic focus of more than 2 million bibliographic records of journal articles, books, and dissertations, the study finds a weak trend toward internationalization of US social-scientific attention over the past half-century. Moreover, the share of scholarly attention devoted to particular regions has remained surprisingly stable over this…
Muslim Modernities: Interdisciplinary Insights Across Time and Space1
odernity announced itself in the singular, as a Western European monopoly. From the beginning, however, scholars disagreed about what modernity consisted of: science, capitalism, division of labor, rationalization, reflexivity, or global dominance. What they shared was the consensus that these characteristics were associated with the West and not with other societies
After the Arab Spring: Do Muslims Vote Islamic Now
Do Muslims Vote Islamic?” asked an article by Charles Kurzman and Ijlal Naqvi in the April 2010 issue of the Journal of Democracy . The answer, at that time, appeared to be rarely. This essay presents updated data on Islamic political parties’ performance in parliamentary elections through the end of 2014, along with an expanded set of electoral platforms. Since 2011, the trend toward liberal themes has stalled, but Islamic parties have not fared…
When Forecasts Fail: Unpredictability in Israeli-Palestinian Interaction
Charles Kurzman, Aseem Hasnain Sociological Science, June 23, 2014 DOI 10.15195/v1.a16 Abstract This article explores the paradox that forecasts may be most likely to fail during dramatic moments of historic change that social scientists are most eager to predict
Powerblindness
In the land of the blind, the one‐eyed man may be king. But positions of power may produce their own forms of blindness. This paper reviews multiple theoretical approaches to the concept of powerblindness and categorizes these literatures into five forms through which powerblindness operates: powerblind identity (failure to notice that one belongs to a privileged group), powerblind egalitarianism (belief that all groups are equal in power), power…
Islamic Studies in U.S. Universities
As in Europe, Islamic studies in the U.S. originated in the tradition of Orientalist scholarship and Christian theology, with its strong textual emphasis, but it has gradually expanded to overlap with Middle East area studies as well as a number of humanistic and social science disciplines, especially religious studies. Over the past several decades, and especially since 9/11, scholarly interest in Islamic studies has mushroomed. This interest is…
The Arab Spring: Ideals of the Iranian Green Movement, Methods of the Iranian Revolution
Which Iranian uprising does the Arab Spring bring to mind? The Green Movement of 2009, which challenged the pillars of the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which brought the Islamic Republic to power
The Arab Spring Uncoiled
If this special issue on Middle East protest had been published two years ago, it probably would have focused more on accounting for the failure of opposition movements than accountting for their successes. Since the "Arab Spring" emerged in the winter of 2011, however, observers have rushed to explain mass revolts in the region. This introduction to the special issue reviews some of the explanations offered for these extraordinary events, and fi…
The Missing Martyrs: Why there are so few Muslim terrorists
Why are there so few Muslim terrorists? With more than a billion Muslims in the world—many of whom supposedly hate the West and ardently desire martyrdom—why don't we see terrorist attacks every day? Where are the missing martyrs? This counterintuitive book demonstrates that terrorist groups are thoroughly marginal in the Muslim world. Drawing on government sources, public opinion surveys, election results, and in-depth interviews with Muslims in…
Muslim American Terrorism Since 9/11: Why So Rare
For Export Only: Diffusion Professionals and Population Policy
Export-only diffusion occurs when innovators do not adopt an innovation themselves, but rather promote it to others for adoption. Potential adopters do not take their cues from early adopters, but rather from diffusion professionals who make it their job to spread a practice or institution. The global spread of national-level, population-control policies during the Cold War is one such instance: developed and promoted by wealthy countries that di…
Do Muslims Vote Islamic
Islamic parties have won parliamentary elections in several countries in recent years, leading some observers to speculate that Muslims vote Islamic whenever they are given the chance. However, a review of every parliamentary election in Muslim societies over the past 40 years shows that Islamic parties often compete and rarely win—and the freer the election, the worse these parties perform. In addition, an unprecedented collection of Islamic par…
A Feminist Generation in Iran
Numerous observers have noted that a feminist generation of educated young women appears to be emerging in Iran, despite the anti-feminist discourse of the Iranian government. Evidence from three surveys conducted in 2000–2003 confirms and complicates these observations. Educated young women are significantly more likely to espouse feminist attitudes of various sorts than other Iranians, including educated young men. In addition, educated young w…
Introduction: Meaning-Making in Social Movements
Introduction:Meaning-Making in Social Movements Charles Kurzman Over the past century, the field of social movement studies has moved several times toward the recognition and analysis of meaning-making by social movement participants. It may be time, now, to make a new leap in this direction. What would happen if we not only recognize meaning-making as an important facet of social movement mobilizations, but privilege it as the central feature of…
Thematic Conversation: Cross-Regional Approaches to Middle East Studies: Constructing and Deconstructing a Region, Mesa 2005-2007
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Cross-Regional Approaches to Middle East Studies: Constructing and Deconstructing a Region
The Middle East is deconstructing—that is, the concept of a coherent geographic entity with the label “Middle East.” A Thematic Conversation on this subject began at the 2005 MESA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., and will conclude at the 2007 meeting in Montréal. These discussions grow out of efforts in the 1990s to rethink area studies globally, spurred by programs at the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science Research…
Structural Opportunity and Perceived Opportunity in Social-Movement Theory: The Iranian Revolution of 1979
Les analyses de Tocqueville des mouvements sociaux apparaissent comme des cas limites ou les chances structurelles (la vulnerabilite de l'Etat a la pression politique populaire) coincide avec les chances percues (le fait que le public soit au courant des possibilites de succes dans le cadre de son activite de protestation). L'A. estime toutefois que cette coincidence n'apparait pas toujours. Il met en avant une disjonction de ce type en ce qui co…
The Sociology of Intellectuals
The sociology of intellectuals has adopted three fundamentally distinct approaches to its subject. The Dreyfusards, Julien Benda, 'new class' theorists, and Pierre Bourdieu treated intellectuals as potentially a class-in-themselves, that is, as having interests that distinguish them from other groups in society. Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and theorists of 'authenticity' treated intellectuals as primarily class-bound, that is, representativ…
Do Muslims Vote Islamic
Islamic parties have won parliamentary elections in several countries in recent years, leading some observers to speculate that Muslims vote Islamic whenever they are given the chance. However, a review of every parliamentary election in Muslim societies over the past 40 years shows that Islamic parties often compete and rarely win—and the freer the election, the worse these parties perform. In addition, an unprecedented collection of Islamic par…
Celebrity Status
Max Weber's fragmentary writings on social status suggest that differentiation on this basis should disappear as capitalism develops. However, many of Weber's examples of status refer to the United States, which Weber held to be the epitome of capitalist development. Weber hints at a second form of status, one generated by capitalism, which might reconcile this contradiction, and later theorists emphasize the continuing importance of status hiera…
Introduction: Meaning-Making in Social Movements
Introduction:Meaning-Making in Social Movements Charles Kurzman Over the past century, the field of social movement studies has moved several times toward the recognition and analysis of meaning-making by social movement participants. It may be time, now, to make a new leap in this direction. What would happen if we not only recognize meaning-making as an important facet of social movement mobilizations, but privilege it as the central feature of…
Dilemmas of Electoral Clientelism: Taiwan, 1993
For many years, studies of electoral clientelism regarded clients as the captive votes of patrons. In recent years, this conventional wisdom has come under challenge, as scholars have come to recognize the widespread noncompliance of clients. This article uses the case of the 1993 Taiwan election to offer the first ever systematic data on noncompliance. Documents from the ruling Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) campaign office in one Taiwanese dist…
Can Understanding Undermine Explanation? The Confused Experience of Revolution
This article makes six points, using evidence from the Iranian Revolution of 1979: (1) Causal mechanisms, indeed all explanations, imply certain inner states on the part of individuals. (2) The experience of revolution is dominated by confusion. (3) People involved in revolutions act largely in response to their best guesses about how others are going to act. (4) These guesses and responses can shift swiftly and dramatically, in ways that partici…
After the Arab Spring: Do Muslims Vote Islamic Now
Do Muslims Vote Islamic?” asked an article by Charles Kurzman and Ijlal Naqvi in the April 2010 issue of the Journal of Democracy . The answer, at that time, appeared to be rarely. This essay presents updated data on Islamic political parties’ performance in parliamentary elections through the end of 2014, along with an expanded set of electoral platforms. Since 2011, the trend toward liberal themes has stalled, but Islamic parties have not fared…
The Arab Spring Uncoiled
If this special issue on Middle East protest had been published two years ago, it probably would have focused more on accounting for the failure of opposition movements than accountting for their successes. Since the "Arab Spring" emerged in the winter of 2011, however, observers have rushed to explain mass revolts in the region. This introduction to the special issue reviews some of the explanations offered for these extraordinary events, and fi…
Organizational Opportunity and Social Movement Mobilization: A Comparative Analysis of Four Religious Movements
When do nonactivist organizations become committed to social movement goals? Building on critiques of the "iron law of oligarchy," this article develops and tests the concept of organizational opportunity, analogous to political opportunity. It divides the concept along two dimensions, the attitudes and authority of organizational leaders. The article examines organizational opportunity in four religious organizations and the social movements tha…
Waves of democratization
Intellectuals and Democratization, 1905-1912 and 1989-1996
This article bridges the gap in studies of the social bases of democratization between qualitative studies focused on social groups and quantitative studies focused on national characteristics. Qualitative historical evidence suggests the importance of classes—in particular, the emerging class of intellectuals—in the wave of democratizations in the decade before World War I. Quantitative cross‐national data on a more recent wave of democratizatio…
Democracy’s effect on economic growth: A pooled time-series analysis, 1951–1980
A Feminist Generation in Iran
Numerous observers have noted that a feminist generation of educated young women appears to be emerging in Iran, despite the anti-feminist discourse of the Iranian government. Evidence from three surveys conducted in 2000–2003 confirms and complicates these observations. Educated young women are significantly more likely to espouse feminist attitudes of various sorts than other Iranians, including educated young men. In addition, educated young w…
Scholarly attention and the limited internationalization of US social science
What parts of the world does American social science consider worthy of scholarly attention? Analyzing the geographic focus of more than 2 million bibliographic records of journal articles, books, and dissertations, the study finds a weak trend toward internationalization of US social-scientific attention over the past half-century. Moreover, the share of scholarly attention devoted to particular regions has remained surprisingly stable over this…
Epistemology and the Sociology of Knowledge
Epistemology, I will argue, is of crucial importance to the sociology of knowledge— not just by way of definition of the phenomenon under study, but also because approaches to the sociology of knowledge rely on too-often implicit epistemological stances. I will make this argument through a series of categorizations: first, I will classify the field of epistemology into its three main forms; second, I will classify the sociology of knowledge into …
Women's Assessments of Gender Equality
Women's assessments of gender equality do not consistently match global indices of gender inequality. In surveys covering 150 countries, women in societies rated gender-unequal according to global metrics such as education, health, labor-force participation, and political representation did not consistently assess their lives as less in their control or less satisfying than men did. Women in these societies were as likely as women in index-equal …
Ideology and Threat Assessment: Law Enforcement Evaluation of Muslim and Right-Wing Extremism
Does ideology affect assessment of the threat of violent extremism? A survey of law enforcement agencies in the United States in 2014 offers a comparison suggesting a small but statistically significant effect: Political attitudes were correlated with assessment of threats posed by Muslim extremists, and threat assessment was not correlated with the number of Muslim Americans who had engaged in violent extremism within the agency's jurisdiction. …
Muslim American Terrorism Since 9/11: Why So Rare
The Arab Spring: Ideals of the Iranian Green Movement, Methods of the Iranian Revolution
Which Iranian uprising does the Arab Spring bring to mind? The Green Movement of 2009, which challenged the pillars of the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which brought the Islamic Republic to power
Cross-Regional Approaches to Middle East Studies: Constructing and Deconstructing a Region
The Middle East is deconstructing—that is, the concept of a coherent geographic entity with the label “Middle East.” A Thematic Conversation on this subject began at the 2005 MESA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., and will conclude at the 2007 meeting in Montréal. These discussions grow out of efforts in the 1990s to rethink area studies globally, spurred by programs at the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science Research…
Globalizing social movement theory: The case of eugenics
Who Doesn't Want Democracy? A Multilevel Analysis of Elite and Mass Attitudes
Despite its global rise in popularity, a significant number of people still oppose democracy. The current study evaluates three competing theories of opposition to democracy-developmentalist, culturalist, and elitist - using a series of multi-level regression models that combine individualand country-level variables. Results of our statistical analyses suggest that: 1) country-level indicators of social, political, and economic development are no…
Sociologies of Islam
The sociology of Islam arguably emerged in the fourteenth century with the work of Ibn Khaldun, but the term itself appeared first in 1931. In recent years, the field has expanded to encompass the study of all aspects of the social lives of the world's Muslims, who constitute one-fifth of the global population-hence the plural label, sociologies of Islam. This article reviews four central debates in the field: approaches to Muslim modernities, ch…
Critics Within: Islamic Scholars' Protests Against the Islamic State in Iran
Paradigm Busting and Vertical Linkage
How the Field Grows: Cases from Berkeley
TWELVE Convincing Sociologists: Values and Interests in the Sociology of Knowledge
Epistemology and the Sociology of Knowledge
Epistemology, I will argue, is of crucial importance to the sociology of knowledge— not just by way of definition of the phenomenon under study, but also because approaches to the sociology of knowledge rely on too-often implicit epistemological stances. I will make this argument through a series of categorizations: first, I will classify the field of epistemology into its three main forms; second, I will classify the sociology of knowledge into …
Historiography of the Iranian Revolutionary Movement, 1977–79
More than Fifty Books, and More than 100 Academic Articles, Have appeared in English alone dealing in significant part with the Iranian revolutionary movement. This impressive output, published in just 15 years, does not reflect a similarly copious wealth of source materials. In fact, the study of the Iranian revolutionary movement is largely, one might argue, sound and fury, a lot of grand theorizing lacking a solid empirical basis. No work on t…
Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals
A slogan is born the two neighbours Islam the Marxist failure the successful Umma a contrast between the Abrahamic faiths civil society completes the circle Adam Ferguson east is east and west is west political decentralization and economic decentralization ideological pluralism and liberal doublethink, or the end of the enlightenment illusion modular man modular man is nationalist friend or foe? the time zones of Europe the varieties of national…
Structural Opportunity and Perceived Opportunity in Social-Movement Theory: The Iranian Revolution of 1979
Les analyses de Tocqueville des mouvements sociaux apparaissent comme des cas limites ou les chances structurelles (la vulnerabilite de l'Etat a la pression politique populaire) coincide avec les chances percues (le fait que le public soit au courant des possibilites de succes dans le cadre de son activite de protestation). L'A. estime toutefois que cette coincidence n'apparait pas toujours. Il met en avant une disjonction de ce type en ce qui co…
Iran after the Revolution: Crisis of an Islamic State
Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook
This book contends that "Liberal Islam" is not a contradiction in terms, but rather a thriving tradition more than a century old and undergoing a revival within the last generation. This anthology presents the translated work of 32 Muslims who are concerned with the separation of church and state, democracy, the condition of women, the rights of minorities, freedom of thought, and the future of human progress.
S oft on S atan: C hallenges F or I ranian ‐U.S. R elations
Waves of democratization
Organizational Opportunity and Social Movement Mobilization: A Comparative Analysis of Four Religious Movements
When do nonactivist organizations become committed to social movement goals? Building on critiques of the "iron law of oligarchy," this article develops and tests the concept of organizational opportunity, analogous to political opportunity. It divides the concept along two dimensions, the attitudes and authority of organizational leaders. The article examines organizational opportunity in four religious organizations and the social movements tha…
Street Politics: Poor People's Movements in Iran
Uzbekistan: The invention of nationalism in an invented nation
(1999). Uzbekistan: The invention of nationalism in an invented nation. Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies: Vol. 8, No. 15, pp. 77-98
Status, Power, and Legitimacy: Strategies and Theories
Iranian Islam: The Concept of the Individual
Introduction F. Ahmadi and N. Ahmadi PART ONE: PHILOSOPHICAL OBSTACLES F. Ahmadi Short Introduction to the Concept of the Individual in the Western Thought The Importance of Sufism in the Study of the Concept of the Individual in the Ways of Thinking of Iranians The Dissolution of Individuality in Persian Sufism The Socio-Cultural Effects of Sufism on the Social Life of Iranians PART TWO: SOCIAL OBSTACLES N. Ahmadi Individuality and Social Realit…
Critics Within: Islamic Scholars' Protests Against the Islamic State in Iran
Democracy’s effect on economic growth: A pooled time-series analysis, 1951–1980
The Sociology of Intellectuals
The sociology of intellectuals has adopted three fundamentally distinct approaches to its subject. The Dreyfusards, Julien Benda, 'new class' theorists, and Pierre Bourdieu treated intellectuals as potentially a class-in-themselves, that is, as having interests that distinguish them from other groups in society. Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and theorists of 'authenticity' treated intellectuals as primarily class-bound, that is, representativ…
Pro‐U.S. Fatwas
The Qum Protests and the Coming of the Iranian Revolution, 1975 and 1978
The Qum Protests and the Coming of the Iranian Revolution, 1975 and 1978
In June 1975 and January 1978, seminary students in the shrine city of Qum, Iran, staged public protests against the regime of Shah Muhammad Riza Pahlavi. In both instances security forces forcibly suppressed the protests. Yet the first incident generated almost no public outcry, while the second incident echoed throughout Iran and quickly became a rallying point for revolutionary mobilization. What was different about Iran in mid-1975 and early …
The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran
Can Understanding Undermine Explanation? The Confused Experience of Revolution
This article makes six points, using evidence from the Iranian Revolution of 1979: (1) Causal mechanisms, indeed all explanations, imply certain inner states on the part of individuals. (2) The experience of revolution is dominated by confusion. (3) People involved in revolutions act largely in response to their best guesses about how others are going to act. (4) These guesses and responses can shift swiftly and dramatically, in ways that partici…
Intellectuals and Democratization, 1905-1912 and 1989-1996
This article bridges the gap in studies of the social bases of democratization between qualitative studies focused on social groups and quantitative studies focused on national characteristics. Qualitative historical evidence suggests the importance of classes—in particular, the emerging class of intellectuals—in the wave of democratizations in the decade before World War I. Quantitative cross‐national data on a more recent wave of democratizatio…
Political science (46 works) · Sociology (38 works) · Law (33 works) · Politics (28 works) · History (26 works) · Law (21 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · History (17 works) · Islamic Studies and History (17 works) · Islam (15 works)