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

The explosion of violence in the name of religion following the Arab Spring, ever-multiplying factional fissures, and the disaggregation of states and societies have left parties active and interested in the region searching for instruments that might enable a more cogent and convincing understanding of a seemingly intractable tangle of interconnected conflicts.

Supported by a major grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the research project and outreach program Striking from the Margins: Religion, State, and Disintegration in the Middle East (SFM) was launched in September 2016 and concluded in March 2024.

The research program, based at the CEU Center for Religious Studies, was supervised by CRS faculty Aziz Al-Azmeh and Nadia Al-Bagdadi. The project further involved a team of post-doctoral fellows and a project coordinator based at CEU. It worked with an international consortium of partner institutions in Amman, Beirut, London, New York and Paris.

Phase I of the project (2017-2019) 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 thematic areas 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.

Phase II of the project, titled Striking from the Margins Project II: From Disintegration to Reconstitution of State and Religion in the Middle East (2020-2023), focused on questions of the possibility or impossibility of reconstitution while continuing to analyze and extend the research agenda of the former project phase.

During the academic year 2023/24 the project prepared a series of discussions and events for March 2024.