Faculty Research Project: Striking from the Margins: Religion, State and Disintegration in the Middle East

A CEU Center for Religious Studies and the Institute for Advanced Study at CEU research project entitled “Striking from the Margins: Religion, State and Disintegration in the Middle East”, supported by a major grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, launched in September 2016.

The research program, based at CEU, is run by 2 project supervisors, a team of post-doctoral fellows and a project coordinator based at CEU and works with an international consortium of partner institutions in Amman, Beirut, London, New York and Paris.

The project is supervised by Professor Aziz Al-Azmeh (CEU Center for Religious Studies and CEU Department of History) and Professor Nadia Al-Bagdadi (CEU Center for Religious Studies and Institute for Advanced Study at CEU).

Phase I of the project Striking from the Margins: Religion, State, and Disintegration in the Middle East focused on creating a nuanced and dynamic understanding of the transformations of religion in relation to those of state and social structures, most specifically in Syria and Iraq over the past three decades while focusing on developing conceptual and analytical vocabularies which would seem adequate to the situation, eschewing facile recourse to culturalist and post-colonialist explanations and lending keen attention to social dynamics, political economy, conjunctural developments and the global setting of comparable developments elsewhere. 

The main thematicareas of the project involve:

• The reframing of religion and the devolution of religious authority to new actors.
• The atrophy and devolution of state functions, including some security functions, to informal patrimonial and private actors.
• Structural marginalization and socio-economic, cultural and geographical segmentation.
• Transnational jihadist networks and the fulfilment of the margins
• The theme of gender practices relations, and their transformations in present circumstances of jihadism and neo-traditionalism, is a transversal one that cuts across all the others listed, and deliberate attention will be paid to it.

For updated information on this project, please visit the website page: https://religion.ceu.edu/sfm