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Murat AKAN

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Murat AKAN

Associate Professor at Boğaziçi University

Fellowship : October 2019 to June 2020

Discipline(s) : Political science

Pays : Turkey

Research project: "the challenges to secularism and democracy in Turkey and India"

Religious nationalism is central in the current third wave of undemocratic movements around the world. While India and Turkey are both hotbeds of religious nationalism, they are also long-time pacemakers of modernity, democracy and secularism outside the West. The contrast between Indian and Turkish secularism cuts deep in the emerging secularism and the past political development literatures; one federal, the other a unitary state; one an example of “moderate,” the other of “rigid” secularism. This project explores the political struggles for these disparate paths in the founding of these nation-states, focusing on how certain institutions were written into law, and how the elites of each country assessed the developments in the other’s country. The project also answers the following questions: despite their vast differences, how have the two countries similarly produced religious nationalist political movements such as Islamist nationalist AKP, and Hindu nationalist BJP? How do the politics of these parties in certain spheres of secularism –speech, education, religious violence- compare? How do the different institutions of Turkish and Indian regimes mediate the struggle between the respective religious nationalist movements and the opposition they face?

Biography

Murat Akan is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics, Political Theory, and Turkish Politics in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (2005) from Columbia University, New York. He was a non-residential post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Amsterdam (2009-2012) and a guest researcher in-residence at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen (2012-2013). He was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Middle East Studies in George Washington University in July and August 2017, and at Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités, CNRS-EPHE-PSL, in Paris in December 2018. His book Politics of Secularism: Religion, Diversity, and Institutional Change in France and Turkey was published by Columbia University Press. His research articles have appeared in various journals such as Studies in Comparative International Development, British Journal of Sociology, International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Anayasa Hukuku Dergisi (Journal of Constitutional Law), French Cultural Studies, and Philosophy & Social Criticism.

Bibliography

AKAN, Murat. The Politics of Secularism: Religion, Diversity, and Institutional Change in France and Turkey, New York, Columbia University Press, 2017.

AKAN, Murat. “Looking Beyond ‘Imaginary’ Analytics and Hermeneutics in Comparative Politics”, in Philosophy & Social Criticism, 43: 4 - 5, 2017.

AKAN, Murat. “Diversité: Challenging or Constituting Laïcité ?”, in French Cultural Studies, 28:1, 2017.          

AKAN, Murat. "The Infrastructural Politics of Laiklik in the Writing of the 1961 Turkish Constitution", in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 13:2, 2011.

AKAN, Murat. "Laïcité and Multiculturalism: The Stasi Report in Context", in British Journal of Sociology, 60: 2, 2009.