new piece with Brookings/Berkley Center

I wrote a commentary piece for the Brookings Institute/Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs’ “geopolitics of religious soft power project.” This project explores how states use religion in their foreign policies, and my contribution looks at America and Russia, drawing on research for my new book project. It is available here.

new forthcoming publication

I’m excited to announce that I have a new article forthcoming in Terrorism and Political Violence. “Assessing the impact of the Global War on Terrorism on terrorism threats in Muslim countries” uses data from my book to assess whether Muslim states’ cooperation with America on counterterrorism helped or hurt when it came to terrorist threats. I find that it actually seemed to help; states that cooperated with the United States experienced a drop in deaths from terrorist attacks. I have a working paper available on my website, and will update it when the final article becomes available.

Awarded new grant

I’m excited to receive one of the project launch grants from Notre Dame’s Global Religion Research Institute. This is a great initiative supporting new research on religion around the world. The grant will support my work applying social network analysis to assess the state of Islamic and secular politics in the Middle East. I presented preliminary work on this project at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, and will present more of this work at the Political Networks conference and the American Political Science Association annual meeting.

new article out on religious conflict and repression

I have a new article out in the Journal of Conflict Resolution (technically in the January 2019 issue), “Taming the Gods: How religious conflict shapes religious repression,” with Jason Klocek (a UC-Berkeley PhD who is currently on a postdoc at Notre Dame). We argue that histories of religious conflict make governments concerned about the political power of religious contention, and they intensify repression as a result. A copy is available on my publications page.