Suchergebnisse

Scholars of Islamist mobilization commonly rely on typological explanations to interpret the motivations, strategies, and goals of religious activists. Such explanations often characterize Islamist movements as "political" or "militant" when they contest state power, and as "civil" or "apolitical" when they do not. This dissertation seeks to overcome the prevailing typological tendencies in the literature and to rethink the conventional dichotomies of the political and the social. The dissertation examines a religious pedagogical movement in Turkey that eschews conventional institutions of politics, and focuses, on the surface, on "teaching religion to fellow Muslims." In doing so, it aims to explain why, how, and with what consequences social movements challenge the state's monopoly over forming and reforming individuals, their morality, subjectivity, and culture. The dissertation draws on eighteen months of fieldwork in Turkey in formal and clandestine sites of religious socialization and pedagogy, one hundred interviews with key local and national actors, and archival work in national libraries. The dissertation makes three contributions to the study of social movements, politics, and social change. First, it advances the social movement literature by documenting how presumably non-political movements that appear on the surface to be concerned with moral reform are in fact deeply political and transformative in nature. Second, it deepens and broadens theories of social and cultural reproduction by demonstrating the centrality of a relatively understudied field--the field of religious socialization/pedagogy--to struggles over creating "orthodoxy" or "correct" forms of knowledge. Third, by extending the study of religious mobilization to a traditionally secular political system, it enlarges the scope of the literature on Islamization, pietism, and sociopolitical change and lays the groundwork for future comparative studies.

The rise of political Islam in Indonesia is a conundrum due to the fact that although Islam is increasingly gaining ground in Indonesian politics, Islamist political parties do not receive many votes. If not political parties, what explains the prevalence of the Islamic agenda? This article stresses the role of Islamic mass organizations (ormas Islam) as the key driver for mobilizing Islamic agendas in the political arena. Islamist groups gain political influence by leveraging their moral authority, organizational capacity and brokerage networks with state actors. In particular, this article highlights emotive appeals as an important mechanism through which Islamist groups mobilize popular political support at the local level. Islamic organizations build popular support over certain political issues through the reproduction of impassioned narratives that are portrayed and diffused as everyday religious practices. This argument is illustrated by two case studies: the mass mobilization during the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election and the implementation of sharia-based regulations. (Contemp Southeast Asia/GIGA)

Scholars have extensively studied social and psychological components of pilgrimage in the past decades. Its political ingredients have less been taken into account. Moreover, there is marginal scientific evidence on connections between pilgrimage and political protests: A response to injustice within a specific agenda and certain goals, remembrance, testimony, imagination, as well as transformation, along with communion and solidarity—are some common features of pilgrims and protesters. There is also the resource mobilization factor—to be analyzed here with a view upon the Romanian 1989 anti-communist revolution in Timișoara. We look at religion as a provider of social ties, in terms of messages with political connotations coming from clergy, and of chain reactions inside religious groups. The qualitative research relies on content analysis of documents, and of 30 semi-structured interviews with former participants to the demonstrations. Results point towards a subtle and circumstantial collective religious mobilization before and during the Romanian revolution. Similarities with pilgrimage are related to the presence of a resourceful actor, converting individual into common needs and generating a collective identity. Differences refer to the spiritual vs. political movement, and to the socio-religious experience vs. the secular search for freedom and justice.

AbstractThree key characteristics of effective electoral mobilizers have been identified in the literature: reputation, embeddedness in the local community, and the ability to reward and sanction voters. Religious leaders may possess all these characteristics. Can they favor their preferred candidates? Using a novel data set of connections between politicians and Italian Catholic bishops throughout the twentieth century, I conduct the first quantitative assessment of the electoral returns of personal connections to a religious leader. Leveraging the timing of bishops' nominations within a difference‐in‐differences strategy, I estimate that bishops born in the electoral district yield a 27% increase in the individual preference votes for their connected candidate. Additional analyses point to the provision of campaign opportunities as the main mechanism driving the effect. These findings suggest that religious authorities can use their local embeddedness to mobilize voters, eventually influencing the selection of representatives in democratic systems.

AbstractIn the 1680s, King Narai, ruler of the cosmopolitan kingdom of Ayutthaya, was the subject of competing French and Persian attempts to convert him to monotheism. These attempts were not only embarrassing failures; they also helped to precipitate a coup in 1688, in which Phetracha forcefully intervened to place himself on the throne and eject French influence from the realm. But to what extent did the execution of the coup depend on popular involvement? And what ideals and emotions seem to have animated this participation? After pondering the role of ethnicity and xenophobic sentiment, this article considers the construction of powerful discourses of Buddhist intellectual opposition to Christianity, the role of the sangha in the orchestration of the coup itself, and then considers in more detail the extent to which 'the people' demonstrated some kind of autonomous political agency. Lastly, it considers whether the events of the coup and its immediate aftermath were shaped by anti-Christian emotion. As a movement with conservative and restorative aims, 1688 was not a 'revolution' in the modern sense, but it may have ushered in an enlarged sense of popular investment in the legitimation of royal contenders associated with the defence of Buddhism.

"Resource Mobilization Among Religious Activists" published on by Oxford University Press.