Why do some countries adopt secular institutions while others do not? This book offers a theory that combines ideational and organizational mechanisms to understand the origins of institutional secularization. The theory proceeds in two moves. First, it focuses on why political groups with a secularizing political agenda emerge. The argument is that the circulation of Enlightenment literature among the literate elite and the existence of associations through which the elite could exchange ideas were the main factors that influenced the early emergence of secularizing political movements. Second, the theory turns to the conditions under which these movements succeed. The argument starts from the premise that secularizing political groups have a comparative disadvantage in recruiting grassroots support because, unlike religious actors, they cannot rely on a pre-existing institutional structure. Secularizing groups overcome this obstacle if they have time to build a robust organization before religious political movements emerge and if the social landscape includes civic associations that they can utilize. The book supports these arguments by combining statistical analysis of original historical data with comparative historical analysis of countries in Europe (France, Spain, The United Kingdom) and the Middle East/North Africa (Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia). This comparative analysis focuses on the fine-grained empirical implications that follow from the causal story that relate to the timing and sequence of events. Overall, the book contributes to the literatures on political institutions, religion and politics, and state formation by developing and corroborating a novel theory that links the dissemination of ideas and organizational timing to the emergence of secular institutions.
Praise for The Origins of Secular Institutions: Ideas, Timing, and Organization "Why do secularizing groups emerge? And when do these advocates of secular institutions and religious tolerance succeed? In this innovative and compelling analysis, Zeynep Bulutgil points to print technology, the diffusion of secularist ideas, and their grafting onto political party organizations as critical to the emergence of secularized institutions. This is a must read for scholars of religion and politics, state formation, and political parties." Anna Grzymala-Busse, Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, Stanford University "
"Bulutgil effectively explains the ideational and organizational mechanisms of success or failure of political secularization processes. Her combination of quantitative and comparative historical methods is impressive. Analyzing France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia, she successfully elaborates the conditions under which secularist movements achieve to secularize state institutions. A major contribution to multiple fields, particularly religion and politics." Ahmet T. Kuru, Professor of Political Science, San Diego State University " "A tour de force of historical sociology and a major contribution to theories of state building. Drawing on new data and a breath-taking array of historical sources on civil society, church infrastructures, and timing and sequencing of reform, Bulutgil provides a new perspective on the origin of secular orders and challenges that secularisers face. Dazzling in its breadth, the author takes us through contexts as diverse as pre-Victorian, Victorian and twentieth century England, to the turbulence of revolutionary France, to Spain, Morocco, and Tunisia. The book is a fresh take on why some seculars succeed and others fail across nations and within the same country in different points in time. This book should be a must read for students of comparative politics, comparative historical analysis, sociology, and international relations." Tomila Lankina, Professor of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science
The Roots of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2016, 2018) Winner of Best Book Award in the European Politics and Society Section of the American Political Science Association in 2017.
Using a new approach to ethnicity that underscores its relative territoriality, Zeynep Bulutgil brings together previously separate arguments that focus on domestic and international factors to offer a coherent theory of what causes ethnic cleansing. She argues that domestic obstacles based on non-ethnic cleavages usually prevent ethnic cleansing whereas territorial conflict triggers this policy by undermining such obstacles. The empirical analysis combines statistical evaluation based on original data with comprehensive studies of historical cases in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Bosnia, in the 1990s. The findings demonstrate how socio-economic cleavages curb radical factions within dominant groups whereas territorial wars strengthen these factions and pave the way for ethnic cleansing. Bulutgil further explores the theoretical and empirical extensions in the context of Africa. Its theoretical novelty and broad empirical scope make this book highly valuable to scholars of comparative and international politics alike.
Praise for Roots of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe
“The Roots of Ethnic Cleansing is an innovative contribution to the systematic study of mass violence. Using a variety of quantitative data, case studies from multiple world regions, and original theory, the book asks and answers a big question. As one of the only dedicated social scientific studies of ethnic cleansing, this book is a landmark that will command attention from scholars for years to come.” Scott Straus, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“The Roots of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe is the most systematic scholarly effort to date to understand of one of the most terrible forms of violence facing humanity. Episodes of ethnic cleansing have ravaged Europe repeatedly over the last 100 years, killing millions of people and rendering tens of millions more refugees. Drawing on in-depth historical and statistical analyses, H. Zeynep Bulutgil locates the causes of these tragedies in territorial conflicts between states and in the nature of the social and political cleavages and hierarchies within states. In so doing, she points the way to policies that might render ethnic cleansing less common in the future.” Benjamin Valentino, Dartmouth College
“By dint of meticulous research and methodical analysis, Zeynep Bulutgil has constructed an argument that is provocative and far-reaching in its implications. Calling into question common assumptions about the relationship between historical memory and inter-communal violence, Bulutgil articulates a powerful argument to the effect that ethnic cleansing is not so much dictated by the legacy of past conflicts as it is set off by the intersection between particular patterns of ethnic geography and warfare. This is a wide-ranging and methodologically rigorous comparative study that forces its readers to reexamine some of their deepest held conceptions about the most common form of warfare in the contemporary world” Aviel Roshwald, Georgetown University
“Bulutgil’s innovative study examines the causes of ethnic cleansing, and why some regions are so much more prone to ethnic cleansing than others. Her fundamental and compelling point is that "territorial revisions” alter the balance of power among groups within annexed territories that then unleash murderous dynamics. She finds that cross-cutting cleavages serve as barriers against ethnic cleansing, while interstate ethnic conflict facilitates ethnic cleansing by increasing salience of ethnicity relative to other cleavages. This theoretical argument is then elaborated and demonstrated through the study of study of Germans in historical Czechoslovakia and Germans in historical Poland, Ukrainians in historical Poland, and Greeks in Ottoman Empire, as well as a main case study of Bosnia. This important book revisits some older theories in comparative politics and ingeniously uses them to address a critical question. In sum, The Roots of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe combines sharp theoretical insight with great empirical material.” APSA European Politics and Society Section Best Book Award Committee, 2017
Articles and Book Chapters
Inequality, Elections, and Communal Riots in India (co-authored with Neeraj Parasad), accepted in Journal of Peace Research. How does inequality within and between ethno-religious groups influence the likelihood and the frequency of communal riots? Using evidence from India, this paper finds that low within group and high between group inequality, dampens the likelihood and frequency of communal riots. Theoretically, the paper argues that the instrumental logic best accounts for this finding. We argue that to be politically competitive, nationalist politicians need their supporters to identify foremost with their ethnic identity. When inequality within groups is high and/or inequality between groups is low, citizens are less likely to focus on ethnicity as their primary identity. In such contexts, politicians use communal riots to improve their electoral prospects by reinforcing the salience of ethnicity. Empirically, the paper relies on cross-district analysis of inequality and Hindu-Muslim riots in India as well as short case studies that focus on the causal logic of the argument.
Civil Society, Fifth-Column Perceptions, and Wartime deportations: Japanese and German Americans (co-authored with Sam Erkiletian), forthcoming in Enemies within Global Politics of Fifth Columns. eds, Harris Mylonas and Scott Radnitz (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Why do politicians perceive certain ethnic groups as fifth columns in some contexts but not others? What is the role of civil society organizations in this process? This chapter offers a two-step argument on why and how political leaders come to view certain groups as fifth columns. First, in democratic and semi-democratic contexts, one of the key determinants of this outcome is the extent to which there are influential civil society organizations that are devoted to the exclusion of the potential fifth-column group. Second, the emergence of these exclusionary organizations depends on the sequence between the development of civic associations and the timing of when the group in question has access to these associations. We evaluate this argument through a comparative analysis of three cases: German Americans during World War I, Japanese Americans on the West Coast During World War II, and Japanese Americans in Hawaii during World War II.
Prewar Domestic Conditions and Civilians in War. Journal of Global Security Studies 2020, 5(3).
Why do states or non-state actors target civilian populations with mass violence? What are the local and national level obstacles that might preclude this type of violence? Why are such obstacles more resilient in some contexts than others? In the last fifteen years, the study of civilians in war (i.e. violence against civilians as well as civilian strategies for survival and resistance during wars) has emerged as a research agenda separate from the study of the causes of wars. Up to now this research agenda has largely been dominated by studies that emphasize the military balance of power or the nature of material resources available to the fighting parties. This review article shows how five recent books on civilians in war improve on this preexisting literature by focusing on prewar social, political, and institutional factors. Based on the findings of the books, the review essay identifies three such factors. First, the organizational skills that civilian leaders develop in the prewar period shape resistance against military actors during wars. Second, political party affiliation, revealed through peacetime elections, influences the patterns of violence against civilians during war. Finally, the dominant state ideology that precedes wars can impact both civilian victimization and the extent to which civilians can evade such violence. The article both assesses the books’ contributions and offers ways in which these contributions can be refined by future research.
Inequality and Ethnic Voting Among Deprived Groups: Evidence from India (co-authored with Neeraj Prasad). Journal of Elections, Public Opinion,& Parties 2020 30(2)
When do individuals vote along ethnic lines? Existing arguments focus on the role of institutions, the nature of interethnic relations, or the relationship between ethnicity and other social cleavages. This paper contributes to the last approach by distinguishing between two dimensions of the relationship between ethnicity and socio-economic cleavages: within-group inequality and between-group inequality. We use elections to state legislatures within India to control for institutional and historical factors that may influence ethnic voting. Using data from the National Sample Survey we calculate inequality in consumption expenditure, educational attainment, and occupational categories. We estimate coethnic voting in terms of voting for a coethnic candidate and voting for an ethnic party. We show that: 1) high within-group economic inequality deters coethnic voting and 2) high between-group economic inequality encourages coethnic voting. Furthermore, between the two, we find that within-group inequality has a greater effect on coethnic voting compared to between-group inequality.
The State of the Field and Debates on Ethnic Cleansing, Nationalities Papers, May 2018.
This review article outlines the progress that the literature on the causes of ethnic cleansing has made in the last ten to fifteen years. The article specifically focuses on two lines of research that have expanded our understanding of ethnic cleansing: a. the studies that focus on the role of wars (this literature can in turn be divided into those works that treat “wars as strategic environments” and those that treat “wars as transformational forces”); b. the studies that focus on the pre-war domestic or international conditions that hinder or promote ethnic cleansing. The last section of the article suggests several future avenues of research that could further refine the study of ethnic cleansing and its relationship to other types of mass violence.
Ethnic Cleansing and Its Alternatives in Wartime: A Comparison of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires. International Security. Spring 2017, 41(4) What are the conditions under which states target minority groups with ethnic cleansing? Recent literature suggests that state leaders turn to ethnic cleansing when the minorities within their territories have ties with enemy states and these ties result in collaboration or rebellion behind frontlines. This paper makes two arguments. First, treating the wartime leadership of states as coherent units is empirically and theoretically misleading. Even during wartime, state leaders differ on the extent to which they prioritize territorial goals as well as in the extent to which they think minority collaboration makes a difference for these territorial goals. Second, I argue that the salience of these divisions turns on the existence of a pre-war political system that includes organized ideological alternatives to nationalism that are based on non-ethnic cleavages. Depending on the existence of such cleavages, minority collaboration during wars might result in full-scale ethnic cleansing, limited deportations and killings, or no violence. To test the argument, I focus on three contexts in which the minority group collaborated with a neighboring enemy during World War I but the reaction of the leadership was very different: a. The Ottoman Empire and its genocidal policy towards the Armenian population during WWI; b. The Russian Empire and the limited deportations and massacres that targeted the Muslims in South Caucasus. c. The Austro-Hungarian Empire and its relatively mild treatment of the Austrian Italians. The analysis supports the notion that facing comparable security challenges, state leaders pursue different policies based on the type of prewar political divisions in the leadership.
Social Cleavages, Wartime Experience, and Ethnic Cleansing in Europe, Journal of Peace Research. September 2015, 52(5) What explains ethnic cleansing? Recent research has used systematic evidence to explore the causes of civilian victimization and mass killings. Yet, comparable studies that focus on ethnic cleansing are still rare. This article conceptualizes ethnic cleansing as a group-level phenomenon that is distinct from civilian victimization or mass killings and studies its causes by using systematic evidence from Europe 1900-2000. Two main findings follow. First, the analysis shows that salient social cleavages, measured through levels of land inequality, political competition, and support for left-wing parties, substantially decrease the risk of ethnic cleansing. Second, the findings suggest that the arguments that underscore psychological mechanisms related to wartime experiences provide a better explanation for ethnic cleansing than the arguments that emphasize the role of strategic wartime aims. The results highlight the importance of treating ethnic cleansing as a conceptually separate phenomenon and offer implications for the debate on democracy and mass ethnic violence.
War, Collaboration, and Endogenous Ethnic Polarization: The Path to Ethnic Cleansing ( in Adria Lawrence and Erica Chenoweth, eds. Rethinking Violence: States and Non-State Actors in Conflict (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010).
This chapter explores the relationship between international security dynamics and the emergence of exclusionist nationalism in multi-ethnic contexts. It studies how interstate relations before and during the Second World War shaped the relationship between the majority and minority ethnic groups and the nature of nationalism in the case of the Germans and Czecks interwar Czechoslovakia and the Greeks and Turks in Ottoman Turkey.
Work in Progress
Secular Party Success in Third Republic France (co-authored with Kit Rickard, ETH).
“Theory-Based Research Design and Evidence in Political Science” (co-authored with Harris Mylonas, George Washington University & Luis Schenoni, University College London).
"Comparing Nationalism: Europe and Indian Subcontinent" (co-authored with Neeraj Prasad, University of Amsterdam)