Authored or edited Books

This book is a thought-provoking study on social violence against religious minorities. Through a nuanced categorization of religious minorities and rich empirical analyses from the Muslim world, Tezcür convincingly shows how deeply rooted religious beliefs can be a distinctive cause of mass atrocities against unorthodox minority groups. It is a major contribution to the literature of religious conflict.

Senem Aslan, author of Nation-Building in Turkey and Morocco

Why do some religious minorities become victims of more brutal and frequent mass violence than others? In this timely book, Güneş Tezcür provides a compelling theory backed by extensive historical evidence to explain how religious beliefs regarding liminal minorities combine with state weakness during periods of political turbulence to precipitate mass violence against them. By doing so, it provides important new insights into the relationship between religion and political violence of interest to scholars of religion, political violence and Muslim politics alike.

Vineeta Yadav, The Pennsylvania State University

This elegantly written and carefully crafted book explores some of the world's most maligned victims of dogmatism and intolerance. Based on extensive fieldwork and personal knowledge, the author leads us into the dark world where groups such as Yazidis in Iraq, Alevis in Turkey, and Baha'is and Ahmadis around the world are persecuted for their faith. These cases raise a larger issue: how diversity can survive in a world bent on homogenizing societies. It is must reading for anyone concerned about the fate of global culture.

Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Global Rebellion

Liminal Minorities addresses the question of why some religious minorities provoke the ire of majoritarian groups and become targets of organized violence, even though they lack significant power and pose no political threat. Tezcür argues that these faith groups are stigmatized across generations, as they lack theological recognition and social acceptance from the dominant religious group. Religious justifications of violence have a strong mobilization power when directed against liminal minorities, which makes these groups particularly vulnerable to mass violence during periods of political change.

Offering the first comparative-historical study of mass atrocities against religious minorities in Muslim societies, Tezcür focuses on two case studies—the Islamic State's genocidal attacks against the Yezidis in northern Iraq in the 2010s and massacres of Alevis in Turkey in the 1970s and 1990s—while also addressing discrimination and violence against followers of the Bahá'í faith in Iran and Ahmadis in Pakistan and Indonesia. Analyzing a variety of original sources, including interviews with survivors and court documents, Tezcür reveals how religious stigmatization and political resentment motivate ordinary people to participate in mass atrocities.

Turkey has a history of multiparty electoral competition going back to 1950, longer than many other nations in the world. Until recently, Turkey was often perceived as a model country that showed the feasibility of democratic governance in a Muslim-majority society. However, the rise of religious-nationalist populism and sociopolitical polarization has resulted in an authoritarian turn that has stifled political liberalization. Turkish foreign policy has had strong linkages with the West but now exhibits a more independent and assertive position. Turkish national identity remains exclusionary as citizens not belonging to the dominant ethnic and religious groups face various levels of discrimination. Political violence persists in the forms of state repression, insurgent attacks, and terrorism; nevertheless, Turkish civil society continues to be resilient. The economy has exhibited sustained levels of growth, though it remains vulnerable to crises. The Oxford Handbook of Turkish Politics includes in-depth analyses of all these issues in conversation with the broader scholarly literature on authoritarianism and democratization, political economy, electoral politics, politics of identity, social movements, foreign policy, and the politics of art. With contributions by leading experts, the Handbook is an authoritative source offering state-of-the-art reviews of the scholarship on Turkish politics. The volume is an analytical, comprehensive, and comparative overview of contemporary politics in a country that literally and figuratively epitomizes “being at the crossroads.”

The diversity of Kurdish communities across the Middle East is now recognized as central to understanding both the challenges and opportunities for their representation and politics. Yet little scholarship has focused on the complexities within these different groups and the range of their experiences. This book diversifies the literature on Kurdish Studies by offering close analyses of subjects which have not been adequately researched, and in particular, by highlighting the Kurds' relationship to the Yazidis. Case studies include: the political ideas of Ehmede Xani, “the father of Kurdish nationalism”; Kurdish refugees in camps in Iraq; the perception of the Kurds by Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire and the Turks in modern Western Turkey; and the important connections and shared heritage of the Kurds and the Yazidis, especially in the aftermath of the 2014 ISIS attacks.

The book comprises the leading voices in Kurdish Studies and combines in-depth empirical work with theoretical and conceptual discussions to take the debates in the field in new directions. The study is divided into three thematic sections to capture new insights into the heterogeneous aspects of Kurdish history and identity. In doing so, contributors explain why we need to pay close attention to the shifting identities and the diversity of the Kurds, and what implications this has for Middle East Studies and Minority Studies more generally.

The innovative, deeply researched, and interdisciplinary chapters in this volume take us beyond the conventional paradigm of Kurds vs. states through their incisive examination of the layers of two open Middle Eastern wounds: the Kurdish issue and the Yezidi tragedy. By weaving together the complicated history and intercommunal relations between the Kurds and the Yezidis, as well as the groups dominating them, the empirically rich essays provide a nuanced account of the factors that have shaped Kurdish and Yezidi identities and their cross-pollinations. Scholars and students of inter-communal relations, ethnic identity, and nationalism will find a mine of information and a multitude of cases to draw on.

Sabri Ates, Southern Methodist University, USA

This book makes a path-breaking contribution to Kurdish and Yezidi Studies. By reflecting on contingent political identities, shifting frames of victimhood and unexpected forms of resistance, the book offers critical insights into the politics of identity and collective memory. This is a must read for anyone interested in Kurdish and Yezidi politics.

Firat Bozcali, University of Toronto

The Kurdish question remains one of the most important and complicated issues in ethnic politics in contemporary times, with the Kurds being one of the largest ethnic groups in the world without a state of their own. A Century of Kurdish Politics brings together a group of distinguished scholars to address the Kurdish question in its centennial year with a fresh analytical lens, to demonstrate that the study of Kurdish politics has developed beyond a narrow focus on the state-minority antagonism. It addresses a series of interrelated questions focusing on Kurdish politics as well as broader themes related to nationalism, ethnic mobilization, democratic struggles, and international security. The contributors examine the agency of Kurdish political actors and their relations with foreign actors; the relations between Kurdish political leaders and organizations and regional and great powers; the dynamics and competing forms of Kurdish political rule; and the involvement of Kurdish parties in broader democratic struggles. Using original empirical work, they place the scholarship on Kurdish politics in dialogue with the broader scholarship on ethnic nationalism, self-determination movements, diaspora studies, and rebel diplomacy. This volume was originally published as a special issue of the journal Ethnopolitics.

A Century of Kurdish Politics: Citizenship, Statehood and Diplomacy — Routledge, 2019.

Moderation theory describes the process through which radical political actors develop commitments to electoral competition, political pluralism, human rights, and rule of law and come to prefer negotiation, reconciliation, and electoral politics over provocation, confrontation, and contentious action. Revisiting this theory through an examination of two of the most prominent moderate Islamic political forces in recent history, Muslim Reformers in Iran and Turkey analyzes the gains made and methods implemented by the Reform Front in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Justice and Development Party in Turkey.

Both of these groups represent Muslim reformers who came into continual conflict with unelected adversaries who attempted to block their reformist agendas. Based on extensive field research in both locales, Muslim Reformers in Iran and Turkey argues that behavioral moderation as practiced by these groups may actually inhibit democratic progress. Tezcür observes that the ability to implement conciliatory tactics, organize electoral parties, and make political compromises impeded democracy when pursued by the Reform Front and the Justice and Development Party. Challenging conventional wisdom, his findings have broad implications for the dynamics of democratic progress.

Muslim Reformers in Iran and Turkey combines theoretical innovation with considerable new empirical material, presenting both through a comparative case study that initially seems an unlikely comparison. Tezcür argues that Islamist groups may indeed become more moderate through political inclusion, but this may have surprising consequences for the larger project of advancing democratization. This critical intervention into the expanding debates about inclusion and moderation will be widely cited and debated by scholars and policymakers.

Jillian Schwedler, author of Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen

Seen from the perspective of even a decade ago, moderate Muslim reformists seemed to be gaining ground in both Turkey and Iran, as these countries emerged from long decades of top-down imposed secularism. In sensitive and compelling prose, Tezcür assesses the different and not entirely predictable paths that these two countries have taken and suggests the different paths that Muslim reforms can take--and the obstacles they face.

Dale F. Eickelman, Dartmouth College