Competition for Religious Authority and Islamist Mobilization: Indonesia and Beyond
My current book project, based on my Ph.D. dissertation (University of Toronto, 2019), seeks to explain why Islamist groups “succeed” in some regions, but fail in others. In my book, I argue that Islamist groups do better where established Muslim leaders and institutions are weak. I show that these contexts create greater competition for religious authority, which lower the barriers of entry to new religious entrepreneurs and reward radical mobilization among established leaders. I develop this theory of Islamist mobilization and communal conflicts by examining sub-regional variations in Islamist mobilization on the Indonesian island of Java. My book builds on 13 months of fieldwork in Indonesia, more than a hundred interviews with Muslim leaders and activists, and a new dataset of Java’s 15,000 religious schools. |
Return to Civil War: Insurgent Groups and the Decision to Abandon Peace
SSHRC-Insight Grant (2021-2026) I am currently a co-investigator in a five-year research project on war to peace transitions in Southeast Asia funded by SSHRC. Led by the Postcor Lab at the University of Toronto, this new project asks "Why do some peace settlements last, while others fail?" This research programme addresses this critical questions by studying insurgent organizations’ evolution during wartime and the post-war period. It aims to explain why some former combatants become integrated into society’s political, economic, and social sectors, while others remain precluded from participation in the post-war state. It identifies three sets of factors—state interventions, insurgent organizational structures, and wartime legacies—as critical to war-to-peace transitions, as well as the transformation of insurgent political, social, and economic institutions into the post-war period. The project focuses on Myanmar, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Principal investigators: Jacques Bertrand (UToronto), Noel Anderson (UToronto), and Alexandre Pelletier |
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