Based on the author's Thesis (doctoral)--University of Oxford. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Habilitation--Universität, Konstanz, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 309-347).

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Freiburg, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [307]-334) and index.

Habilitation--Universität, Konstanz, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 309-347).

No description available.

This thesis offers an alternative of political leadership through a literature review of democratic theory as categorized into three models: classical, elitist, and egalitarian. The three models considered an ethical, an institutional, and an economic institutional postulate of political elites and their relationships. Still, the democratic elitist model emerging as the dominant model has been challenged by the egalitarian model enforcing economic institutional elites to be accountable to mass interest. As a competing idea, the egalitarian democratic model has been analyzed for its desirability over the democratic elitist model. This study is worthwhile in instigating an underscored concern surrounding economic institutional elites in the scope of accountable political elites, and in calling forth a further study on the preferred alternative, democratization of economic institutional elites.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-05T12:06:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 30 / Nenhuma / O intenso processo migratório brasileiro campo-cidade, visto nos anos 30-40, desencadeou impactos profundos no seio das relações sociais e cotidianas da cidade de Cachoeira do Sul (RS), alterando a convivência diária entre a elite moradora do espaço central que, de certa forma, cultuavam carisma grupal distintivo, cerrando fileiras e estigmatizando os não pertencentes ao grupo, os “outsiders”, migrantes “subalternos” ou todos aqueles que viviam do “lado de fora”. Nesta tese, busquei a dinâmica desta mudança no dia-a-dia da elite cachoeirense, considerando as transformações da diferenciação social praticada por esse grupo, procurei ver os estigmas que a elite lançava sobre os forasteiros, como se constituía a sociodinâmica dessa estigmatização, principalmente através das páginas do Jornal do Povo (JP), porta-voz da elite. Tentei compreender como o espaço urbano central da sede do município constituiu-se em campo de enfrentamento das forças simbólicas locais, no momento em que abrigou ou excluiu os habitantes d

In my dissertation, I explore four inter-related research areas that advance the study of elite influence, identity, and conflict. How does religion interact with changing political conditions over time to affect contemporary patterns of extremism? To what extent do extremist attitudes explain variation in extremist behavior? What does the relationship between these two variables, and the similarities and differences in their correlates, imply for theories of extremism and ethnic conflict more generally? The next two themes focus on the way in which anti-violence appeals by elites shape extremism among followers. How does anti-violence religious---as opposed to economic--persuasion by an elite affect extremism, and can it overcome a counterargument to the peace message by a peer? Finally, what explains variation in the effectiveness of clerical persuasion on extremist behaviors across religious groups? In the opening chapter, I ask how changing political conditions shape the capacity of religious elites to mobilize extremism. In what ways might changing conditions lead to differential effects within religious groups? I study these questions based on primary field research in Lucknow and analysis of secondary historical sources. I demonstrate how the rise and fall state-sponsored religion, government regulation of religious rituals, and heightened foreign sectarian conflict structured efforts by religious elites to change norms in ways that increasingly permitted violence. For the Shia, such changing political conditions interacted with elements of their constitutive political myth in ways that strengthened perceptions of victimization. The ensuing difference in perceived group status has placed unique constraints on the persuasiveness of present-day Shia clerics who propagate pro-peace norms to their followers. Taken together, the study offers important lessons for the relationship between political conditions and the transmission of religious ideas, the durability of identities, and the effectiveness of elite persuasion in conflict settings. Chapter 3 focuses on the relationship between extremist attitudes and behavior. Research on the factors associated with religious extremism have focused on either extremist attitudes or behavior. Yet to date, there is little empirical evidence on the relationship between extremist attitudes and behavior, including on whether they are associated with the same factors. To help inform research gaps, this study leverages a face-to-face survey of 480 Sunni and Shia Muslim youth in Lucknow's Old City that employed attitudinal and behavioral measures of extremism. The results offer some of the first evidence that extremist attitudes are significant predictors of extremist behaviors, but that the strength of the relationship is not as strongly as commonly expected. Second, the study argues that economic grievances are stronger predictors of extremist attitudes than of behavior, and thus challenges theoretical expectations from the conflict literature. Third, the study points to a model of extremism in which religious and psychological factors, rather than grievance or social network explanations, drive both extremist attitudes and behaviors. The fourth chapter turns attention to the causal effect of elite persuasion and bottom-up countermessaging on religious extremism. Can pro-peace persuasion by religious or economic elites reduce religious extremism? Will such effects survive counterarguments? This study uses an audio recording experiment to examine these questions in the context of religious extremism in northern India. Sunni and Shia young adult men were randomly assigned to listen to an audio message recorded by a real in-group cleric emphasizing norms discouraging violence or a real in-group shopkeeper emphasizing material considerations discouraging violence. Another treatment---listening to a counterargument to the peace message by an in-group member---tests counter-messaging. Results indicate a surprising pattern: religious persuasion increases extremism the Shia sample and reduces extremism for the Sunni sample. Although these effects do not reach statistical significance within each sample, the difference between sects of the marginal effects of religious persuasion and the counterargument message are significant. The results support a novel logic involving group victimization consistent with experimental results and qualitative evidence. The final chapter of the dissertation examines clerical persuasion and its impact on religious extremism. How does an anti-violence religious message by a cleric affect extremism? Do such appeals work differently across groups? I argue that exposure to such an appeal from an in-group cleric reduces extremism for members of a non-victimized group but not for members of a victimized group. The latter retain extremism to guard against anticipated threats. I present evidence from an audio recording experiment among 2,100 Sunni and Shia young adult men in Lucknow, the Indian city where sectarian violence is highest and the Shia perceive themselves as victimized. I randomly assigned subjects to listen to an anti-violence religious argument from either an in-group cleric; out-group cleric; both; or none. Results show that the in-group message significantly reduces extremist behaviors up to 8 hours later for Sunni but not Shia subjects. Additional analyses and qualitative research emphasize the plausibility of the victimization logic. Furthermore, the out-group message and the interaction do not significantly change behavior for either group. I argue that intergroup inequalities matter for understanding the effectiveness of elite persuasion and discuss policy implications.

Modern Chinese Muslims’ increasing connections with the Islamic world conditioned and were conditioned by their elites’ integrationist politics in China. Chinese Muslims (the “Hui”) faced a predicament during the Qing and Ottoman empire-to-nation transitions, seeking both increased contact with Muslims outside China and greater physical and sociopolitical security within the new Chinese nation-state. On the one hand, new communication and transport technologies allowed them unprecedented opportunities for transnational dialogue after centuries of real and perceived isolation. On the other, the Qing’s violent suppression of Muslim uprisings in the late nineteenth century loomed over them, as did the inescapable Han-centrism of Chinese nationalism, the ongoing intercommunal tensions between Muslims and Han, and the general territorial instability of China’s Republican era (1911-49). As a result, Islamic modernism—a set of positions emphasizing both reason and orthodoxy, and arguing that true or original Islam is compatible with science, education, democracy, women’s rights, and other “modern” norms—took on new meanings in the context of Chinese nation-making. In an emerging dynamic, ethos, and discourse of “transnationalist integrationism,” leading Chinese Muslims transformed Islamic modernism, a supposedly foreign body of thought meant to promote unity and renewal, into a reservoir of concepts and arguments to explain and justify the place of Islam and Muslims in China, and in so doing made it an integral component of Chinese state- and nation-building. “Islamic Modernism in China” argues that Chinese Muslims’ transregional engagement with Islamic modernism did not subvert but enabled the Chinese government’s domestic and foreign policies toward Muslims, and ultimately facilitated the nationalization of Muslim identity in modern China. From Qing collapse through the Second World War, urban coastal Chinese Muslim religious and political elites imported, read, debated, disseminated, and translated classic Islamic texts and modern Muslim print media, while establishing their own modernist schools and publications. Yet those same figures, through those same practices and institutions, increasingly wielded an image of Islamic authority and authenticity in support of the nationalist Guomindang government’s efforts to develop, integrate, and Sinicize China’s frontiers, including the predominantly Sufi Muslim communities of the Northwest. In the 1930s and early 1940s, integrationist Chinese Muslim elites further mobilized modernist narratives of Islam’s rationality, peacefulness, and past and present “contributions” to China. For example, they responded to Islamophobic misperceptions about halal by arguing that Islamic medicine was an important part of Chinese medicine. They also dispatched nationalistic goodwill delegations to the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China’s own frontiers during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), to pursue cultural cooperation and spread anti-Japanese propaganda. At the same time, in contrast to this instrumentalized Islam, certain Chinese Muslim scholars studying in Cairo instead articulated an expansive, democratized version of the Islamic concept of independent human reason (ijtihad) as the basis for a more inclusive vision of both Chinese nationalism and the global Islamic community (umma). The opportunity to pursue this or any other alternative to mere integrationism soon evaporated, however, as the renewed Chinese Civil War (1945-49) split the Chinese Muslim elites across the Mainland, Taiwan, and a variety of Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Thereafter, the Chinese Muslim elites largely became marginalized from high politics in the era of Cold-War and decolonization. Many of their once-contingent narratives of history and identity, however, have nevertheless been normalized as the canonical truth of Chinese Islam to this day, quietly informing China’s minority policies, foreign relations, and rhetoric of the “New Silk Road.” “Islamic Modernism in China” is a history of the subsumption of modern forms of mobility by modern structures of power. It narrates an assertion of difference in the context of multiple, partially overlapping integrations: the integration of a Han-centric idea of the Chinese nation-state, of an Arabo-centric idea of the Islamic world, and of a Eurocentric system of global infrastructures, institutions, networks, and knowledge. It de-parochializes the modern history of Chinese Muslims, showing how they epitomized aspirations and challenges common to Muslim minorities across many large non-Muslim societies and, to an extent, to modern Muslims everywhere. Using a wide range of new or under-studied archival and published sources in Chinese and Arabic, it connects questions of the meaning and scope of Islam, Islamic community, and Islamic modernism (scholarship on which tends to prioritize the Arab Middle East and relations with the West) to questions of religion and state in modern China (scholarship on which tends to prioritize popular spirituality and the official Confucian system, as well as relations with the West). As such, it presents Sino-Islamic transregional interactions beyond the lens of Western influence, yet also uncovers new trajectories by which Western concepts (“religion,” the “nation-state,” the “Islamic world”) became universalized. Overall, it moves beyond a circulation-based understanding of global encounters, and instead maps the contingent ways in which forms of mobility became pressed into the service of hegemonic processes of state- and nation-building: how flows of people and ideas created borders rather than simply crossing them.

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