Dr. Öztürk is an associate professor at London Metropolitan University. His contribution to research and the discipline has been both prolific and influential. He has published 35 peer review articles in well-respected journals such as Mediterranean Politics, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Journal of European Political Science, Politics and Religion, Religion, Political and Ideology, The International Spectator and Migration Letters and recently his first solo authored book Religion, Identity and Power: Turkey and the Balkans in the Twenty-First Century. While his work touches on many topics in religion and politics among his most important contributions is contribution to the concept of religious soft power. He develops this in the context of the Turkish government’s use of its government-supported religious institutions to instrumentalize Turkish diasporas to lobby and influence governments across Europe and the Balkans, a topic which he addresses in several of his articles and his most recent book.

Committee members:

  Jonathan Fox (Chair), Bar-Ilan University
Ron Hassner, University of California, Berkeley
Jeff Haynes, London Metropolitan University

Committee Members:
Anita Weiss (Chair), University of Oregon
Mark Jurgensmeyer, University of California, Santa Barbara
David Buckley, University of Louisville

Alon Burstein
Terrorizing God’s Enemies: The influence of religion on terror group activity
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, March 2021

The selection committee unanimously agreed to recognize Alon Burstein of Hebrew University of Jerusalem as the winner of the 2023 Inaugural Mark Juergensmeyer Best Dissertation Award for Religion and International Relations. Burstein’s dissertation is an innovative treatment of the role of religion in terror groups. It makes a fundamental theoretical contribution by challenging the assumed dichotomy between religious and secular terror groups, instead arguing that religiosity fluctuates over time, both between and within groups, in response to political conditions. Empirically, the project develops original quantitative measures, and then leverages a close qualitative process tracing to illustrate its contentious politics model with analyses of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and of Hamas. Burstein’s work is a most worthy winner of this inaugural Mark Juergensmeyer dissertation award.

Runners up ($250 each)

1. Irmak Yazici, Seeing through Secularism: What Religious Controversies can tell in India
and Turkey Political Science, University of Hawaii at Manoa, May 2022
Irmak Yazici’s dissertation is a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rigorous inquiry into the trajectory and contemporary evolution of secularism in India and Turkey, showing how it has facilitated the crystallization of religious nationalism in both countries. It argues that the politics of secularism generates and manipulates religious controversies (such as reflected in the controversies over the fiction of Salman Rushdie and Orhon Palmuk) through exploring it as a source of political contestation, true to her assertion that the modern state always prefers to deal with religious ideologies rather than with faiths.

2. Misbah Hyder, Empowerment through Submission: Conceptualizing Ahmadiyya Muslim Agency as Sabr Political Science, UC Irvine, December 2022
Misbah Hyder has written a powerful dissertation on the Ahmadiyya community, an often-persecuted offshoot within Muslim culture seeking to reclaim its identity despite being denied by Muslims globally and contrasting the community’s survival in Pakistan and in Ghana. More than a valuable ethnographic account, Hyder offers a conceptual understanding of the movement’s persistence and its reliance on sabr, translated as patience or perseverance. She skillfully shows that this is not just a mode of response but a socio-political form of resistance and survival that, in focusing on their ethical intentionality, has applicability to similar minority communities around the world.

Honorable Mention certificates
1. Simon Polinder
Towards a New Christian Political Realism? The Amsterdam School of Philosophy and the Role of Religion in International Relations, VU Amsterdam, June 2021
2. Elizabeth Moorhouse-Stein
Pushback Organizations: Cohesion and Division among Jews in the United States, France, and Canada Political Studies, Queens University, August 2023
3. Aidan Milliff
Seeking Safety: The Cognitive Foundations of Civilian Behavior during Violence, Political Science, MIT, September 2022
4. Emma Rosenberg
Rally around the Steeple: Religious Rhetoric and Nativist Parties in Central Europe Political Science, Notre Dame, May 2022

No award as there were no submissions.

Committee members:
Renat Shaykhutdinov (Chair), Florida Atlantic University
Vendulka Kubálková, University of Miami
George Saroka, Harvard University