Researching Identity Politics and Development in the Middle East

[Kevin Harris]: Welcome, my name is Kevin Harris. I'm a sociologist here at UCLA. You're here for a talk by professor Melanie Cammett. I just want to introduce her and also thank the sponsors of today's noon talk. This is a talk sponsored by the Center for Near Eastern Studies here across the hall in Bunche, and if you're a graduate students or even an undergraduate Melanie will be in the CNES offices tomorrow at noon for a graduate student and undergrad luncheon professional development talk, kind of you know, hearing about discussing projects, methods, initiatives, etc. I've known Melanie for a long time. One of the nicest things Melanie ever did was invite me to come sit in on her classes at Brown when she used to teach at Brown and I got to meet Brown students and she let me, as a graduate student mind you, go on and on about my fieldwork in Iran and she made me feel very fancy. My project wasn't for it so that was a big help for me. Since then Melanie's done a lot more. She has two monographs to her name as well as an updated version of probably the most popular and probably best political economy textbook on the Middle East which Melanie co-authored with ??? she's involved in many many projects on the Middle East and I think writes in a way and engages in a variety of methods that is not just to political scientists but also historians and sociologists who engage in you know long-term fieldwork in these cases in these Finnish places and actually Melanie has done that on her own. So today she's going to talk, I kind of think, a more overarching talk on researching identity politics and development in Middle East which is a precursor to do another big project that she's in the middle of with some students and so if you are a graduate student, I highly encourage you to come tomorrow to the noon talk over across the hall. There will be lunch provided. So without any further ado, Professor Melanie Cammett from Harvard University.

(applause)

[Melani Cammett]: Well thank you so much for inviting me. It's really nice to be here and the view is unbelievable; I'm told I actually might be looking at a Kardashian home right now. So I was told to speak sort of almost autobiographically about my research trajectory, so it feels a little kind of embarrassing to do that but I will do that, but along the way hopefully it's more about the research and what I want to show is sort of how I got to these topics and get under the hood and sort of share some maybe not ideal research design encounters that I had along the way you know because oftentimes when we finish a research project it looks like we had everything figured out from the beginning and we just sort of executed a plan but that is not how many things have come to me so and it sort of depends on the project but you know and and the method you're using as well because in political science at least there's this trend towards if you're doing experimental work pre-registering your research so you do lay out a road map with very precise things pre-registered and commit to them in advance and confess if you deviate from them publicly and so forth. So I have engaged in a little bit of that more recently in the last few years and it's a very different style of doing research and sort of approach to doing research than many of my other projects. So I thought I'd just give a sort of overview of not just what these projects are but sort of how I got to them and how I thought of them because sometimes I think it's interesting to hear about how people come up with the questions that they're interested in and then how I chose some of the methods and I should say that I'm a very eclectic person when it comes to topics and methods and and I am interested in many different approaches so if it's something I haven't done already I'll try to learn about it and collaborate with people that are more expert in the particular approach and so for me it's been a fun journey along the way to get exposed to different questions and approaches to studying them. So I just want to focus on a number of research themes starting with the politics of development political economy work and I thought maybe I'll only touch on that very briefly. I'm happy to talk more about that if anyone's interested in Q&A or if anyone's coming tomorrow, we'll talk more about that. But really what I want to focus on is a series of projects that are largely clustered around identity and development identity and welfare and so I'll talk I'll focus more on that which stemming from work that I did for a book that came out like five years ago and that has led to a bunch of subsequent research projects so I'll talk a little bit about some of the work that started off in this vein for me the work on non-state social welfare and this book Compassionate Communalism and then I want to talk about some areas that I've gone into as a result of the field work that I undertook for that book project and I would say, broadly speaking, these projects I have going center on some aspect of how sectarianism manifests in everyday life and so I'll talk about a project that's relates to access to social services and later on in the day I'm going to be speaking at this colloquium on one of the papers that's coming out of that project and then I'll talk a little bit about some projects that relate to intergroup relations and public goods provision and then another cluster of projects related to religion and political behavior and then finally I think I have what like 45 minutes or something so maybe I'll skip over some of this but and then I'll talk a little bit about some stuff I'm in the very early stages of thinking about right now for a next book project so you can see how the idea came about and how half-baked it is right now. Hopefully it won't be like that in several years or less. So let me just briefly talk about this line of stuff and then move on because it might be of interest to some people. So Kevin mentioned that I did this updated book with a co-author ??? who I have some ongoing other work with and this is probably some of you have heard of the Richards and Waterbury text, A Political Economy of Middle East, but this was sort of like the Bible when I was in graduate school you know sort of knowing sort of basic features of the political economy of the entire region so we got offered to take over this book and it is you know in some ways it is a textbook but it's also a book it's sort of this weird hybrid thing and so we had the opportunity to develop it in a different direction we tried to sort of build more of a framework in this book and so we focused on several core themes in the updated version and now we're actually supposed to be doing another version which I keep putting off but eventually we'll have to do that but we tried to sort of lay out a framework that presents the region as varieties of political economies with at least three different clusters actually four in the region and then talked about the various ways that social contracts developed in these different political economies, how fiscal crises have manifested across the whole region but in different ways in these different political economies and then focus on this very important issue of crony capitalism I know you've contributed to some of the work that ??? has ongoing with that theme but just to mention that this you know working on this thing gave rise to a number of questions for me that I've been pursuing in one way or another. First of all, when we had some figures in one of the opening chapters in this book that looked at things like growth rates comparatively cross-regionally over time and that actually when you look across regional comparative perspective, the Middle East is not that underdeveloped. I'm not saying it's a panacea of beauty and development and equity and so forth, not at all, we know that and there's a lot of interesting research coming out by economists now looking at how vastly under-measured inequality is for example in the Middle East but there's this neck the reason why this was interesting to me is there is a narrative out there in some of the long-term historical work in economics and political science on the Middle East that it's a total basket case and a lot of it juxtaposes the Middle East to Europe and Western Europe and gives a lot of long term historical reasons whether it's Islamic institutions or patterns of State Society relations that developed in the Muslim world and so reading this work you think the Middle East is particularly underdeveloped but it's actually not by some measures and so I thought this was interesting and and worthy of exploration I'm not doing any active project that looked cross regionally at this. I mean I do think this is work that somebody should be doing more but I did write a sort of big essay about this that touched off some thinking. What I have been doing more with ??? we're working on this never-ending paper looking at varieties of rule of law in the Middle East. Hopefully we're close to completion and sending this thing out because there is interesting variation there and when you adopt a very sort of narrow definition of the rule of law around commercial transactions there's some interesting variation in countries across the region with some respecting commercial transactions more than others so we're doing a little bit of work on that and then I've also been interested in sort of intra-regional variation about why is it that welfare regimes developed differently within this region. There is some very interesting work on this as coming out right now in a book by Ferdinand ??? I think he's at King's College in the UK. He's worked looking really in the post-colonial period but I'm working on this project with a number of graduate students and postdocs that is an effort to digitize data from the colonial period through the present for 18 countries in the region and and we are eventually going to make this public we're calling it the MENAHDA project - the Middle East North Africa historical data archive - you get the pun with NAHDA and so we've been putting together this data set. We're working with the Institute for quantitative social science at Harvard to create a platform that's going to make it publicly available and interactive so people can download it and upload and so forth. But you know of course we want to do something with this data first so we're working on a couple of papers right now looking at questions like "Why do you see more social spending in some places rather than others?" and looking at the relative effects of colonial legacies versus post colonial legacies because at least among political scientists I think we haven't paid that much attention to colonial legacy I know economic historians have and my late wonderful colleague Roger Owen was one of the big players in this but we as political scientists have not looked so much for the Middle East North Africa region at colonial legacies and looking at the degree to which colonial legacies persist or actually break down in the post-colonial period so that's sort of what we're looking at in a variety of papers there. But I'm gonna actually leave this aside because I do find this stuff interesting but I've been more running in this other direction that stems from the work that I did on this book that came out in 2014 and I think it's worth just saying how I got on to this because it's interesting to think about where do these questions come from so I arrived I got interested in this phenomenon of religious or ethnic actors providing Social Welfare right after the U.S. invaded Iraq. There was this newspaper article in The New York Times said you know back then we were still reading paper copies and opening up and reading if you really wanted to read the article you don't open it up and read to the end and so I read this entire article including inside the paper and there was this one paragraph in there and the article was about all these new parties that popped up in the wake of the US invasion that there were like I don't know scores and not more parties that had popped up out of the woodwork and suddenly for many of them were religious parties like the Shia such-and-such party or whatever and one of these Shia parties had a flag and it went to a health center in Baghdad and planted the flag on it and said, "This is now the Shia such-and-such party health center." I thought this is a crazy phenomenon. This is a country that had a pretty centralized public welfare system not necessarily a good one after especially after sanctions and so forth and war but it was a largely predominantly public welfare system and all of a sudden all these parties are popping up and some of them are claiming pieces of the state and putting their flags on it and I started thinking that is a crazy phenomenon. Imagine being a family living in Baghdad in this you know this invasion. The state is toppling you have to figure out where am I gonna go take my kid who has a fever and then you show up and there's now a Shia political party running your help center, what does that mean for people? So that's sort of what got me thinking about it but you know this is a this project eventually ended up with this question of you know "Why is it that some sectarian organizations reach out across communal lines and deliver more broadly to to people from other communities or people that aren't that active supporters and why are some of them more focused on delivering to their own communities which is sort of the default assumption?" I'm not going to get into what I argued and all that stuff here but I just want to say that you know I didn't arrive at this question from the moment that I read that New York Times article. This is a case of what you know soaking and poking so you know multiple research trips, tons of interviews, feeling out. I spent a month in 2004 in Lebanon talking to different groups and the reason why it ended up being Lebanon is originally I was gonna do this work in Iraq and I'd actually been talking to Anthony Shaheed who was then the Washington Post Middle East correspondent and he said, "Well you know come stay in the Washington Post house and you can start working on this and then things heated up with the war in Iraq and just seemed like it was not a practical thing to do to go do fieldwork in Iraq at that time so but lo and behold you know there was all the very similar stuff going on in Lebanon albeit coming out of a different historical context and so forth and in fact there was this freeze going around in the mid to late 2000s in Iraq in Arabic, the Lebanonization of Iraq, so people were talking about how Iraq was sort of looking more and more like Lebanon and in this respect that was certainly true where you had more religious actors popping up as parties and also as welfare providers among other things so so that's how I got to that is just you know many interviews back and forth trying to figure out sort of what was the you know there were many questions that came out of my head about this like what's the effect of getting your welfare from a religious provider on your political behavior and all sorts of things like that but for a variety of reasons I ended up focusing more on this question, and just to say a little bit about data and methods, this was also a work in progress. I would be lying if I said to you, "Oh I had the research design figured out from the beginning." Basically I started it off by doing tons of interviews. I did all the elite interviews myself and then worked with a team of graduate students in Lebanon who interviewed people from their own communities and it's not that they all were sectarians who identified themselves as Sunni or Shia or whatever but it just made a lot more sense to have people from the same community interviewing people for a variety of reasons that are probably self-evident to you and so that started making me think a lot about how to narrow this down I spend a lot of time just hanging out in health centers and and schools and hospitals and pedagogical training institutes run by all of the actors so the book is about Hezbollah the future movements the ??? movement, three different Christian parties and I certainly was in all of their institutions such as they had them but but I also visited a lot of religious charities and NGOs that didn't have affiliations and so that started making me think of other questions along the way and was really informative also about you know what the political parties were doing and then I you know also started looking more at the materials that these parties were producing not just in the contemporary period but over time so there were some really interesting publications dating back decades by especially by the Christian parties but also by Hezbollah that sort of detailed their welfare activities where they were opening up centers you know the kinds of community context they had so there were some very interesting sort of archival materials - I don't know, we can call them that - that also were helpful but then I started thinking well I'm getting a picture of what's going on here from all these interviews but nobody's gonna believe me if I just tell you even with 175 interviews that this is what's going on. How do I make an argument that seems to apply more generally and that seems slightly more convincing? So that's when I started thinking about this spatial component so that one of the chapters in the project basically looks at correlations between where these parties establish their programs and what the communities look like, particularly in terms of sectarian demography like are they targeting places that are populated by exclusively their own people? Are they targeting mixed areas and so that became interesting to me and I came to that idea not because I was having some deductive insight into this but because in these interviews over and over and over again people kept telling me just look at where they put their facilities. This is meaningful and this is not just meaningful in terms of the priorities of the parties but this is how citizens and other actors were interpreting the actions of these groups so so I came to this approach through interviews that's what gave me the idea and fortuitously at that very moment Brown University which is where I was based had just started a spatial analysis program so I did like a course in GIS analysis and so that there was support for this kind of stuff. And then I also did a survey to see if some of the arguments I was making the least observable implications of them held in a nationally representative sample so you know it it came to me sort of in various waves not at some immediate sort of initial point in the project and I think I probably approach my research quite a little bit more a little bit differently after doing this but that's the way this this project unfolded for me but what was I think interesting for me also is that it sort of lent itself to a lot of other directions I mean doing all this fieldwork really being there in these institutions and talking to people a lot about this phenomenon got me thinking about a lot of other questions one of them was culminated in an edited volume I did with ??? on the politics of non-state social welfare because we started thinking more broadly given the work that each of us do on different types of non-state providers and welfare that there's some larger questions here so we worked on an edited volume there that brought together a bunch of people working in places all over the world but it also started making me think you know about other questions so one of them was you know all these people when I was visiting these centers are talking to people about the welfare programs of Hezbollah or whatever kept saying oh you know Hezbollah is much better at doing this than others that's why they have so much support but these are completely unsubstantiated claims they're just sort of thrown out there by people who and people who love Hezbollah and people who hate Hezbollah you know if you love them you say oh they're so good and people who hate them say oh they're you know this is just how they buy support so so I kept hearing that over and over again and then we know that ??? was doing this and other organizations so I started thinking well is there something to this because we often hear about like essentially the party discipline of these groups and are they particularly organized and you know do they have great better grassroots penetration and some people have been doing some really interesting work on this like Steven Brooks' recent book and so maybe that translates literally into better welfare delivery right because there are certain features of an organization's capacity that enables it to provide services better so so I started thinking about this question about and and more broadly people were saying that Islamists have advantages in the political sphere so I I did a you know sort of review essay with an analytical framework on this with ??? at Michigan where we started thinking through some of these ideas and one of the ideas in there what also was related to how welfare might translate into into you know better respect for these organizations. They're a popular appeal and and so forth. So but then I started thinking we don't actually know how well these groups are supplying it this is a supplying welfare but this is a question I entirely sidestepped in the book that I did I didn't attempt to assess this whatsoever so I I ended up getting this Mellon Foundation Fellowship to go spend a year at the Harvard School of Public Health studying Public Health like taking classes in certain aspects of public health and research methods and so forth and I developed this project and was supporting this project to look at the quality of primary health care and initially it was pitched in terms of Islamists providing health care do they supply better healthcare than others and I was going to do work in Lebanon but it became a broader project and and so so I so that's part of that the project on access to social welfare I want to talk about a little bit and then if we have time I'll talk about some of the other stuff but you know they arguably this is an important feature of people's lives in places where sect is very politicized and where these groups are involved in either providing the benefits or brokering access to them this is sort of a manifestation of sectarianism in everyday life and then just the the last thing that this the book that I wrote in 2014 sort of started me on was thinking about the phenomenon of sectarianization and initially I was thinking oh okay let's you know let me write a book about sectarianization and there's been some really interesting work some of you might be familiar with that edited volume that came out a couple years ago by ??? who still I think called sectarianization and I so after I read that I was like I don't need to write this book I think we know this already and there's been a lot of really great work on how ethnic identity gets politicized right so I don't think I have much to add there but but then I started thinking we actually don't know a lot about how this stuff comes down once it gets politicized so so time permitting I want to talk about that at the end but this all came out of doing this project on the ground in Lebanon and then having repeat visits over time and actually in real time I literally it's almost like a slow-motion camera I literally witnessed sect become politicized in Lebanon between 2004 and the present because it was not the politics of sect even in sectarian power-sharing Lebanon was not so politicized as it became after 2005 with ??? after 2008 after the Syrian war and so forth so I have literally watched you know interpersonal relations between people who have been friends for 25 years break apart over sect and so it's been this really bizarre sort of slow-motion observation of sectarianization in the same place over time and then and then so that that got me interested in this question like how do you bring it down so so let me just talk a little bit about a couple of these projects I'm aware I don't have time to talk that go into all the detail I have here but but I mentioned I had this fellowship to go spend the year studying certain aspects of public health so so a colleague of mine at Brown connected me with this economist at the World Bank ??? who's done all this interesting work on measuring the quality of health and education initially in India but then in all kinds of other places and he developed a set of tools with his collaborators to systematically measure quality and so I started you know really digging into the stuff that they were doing and learning more about this and talking to people at the School of Public Health about how different people measure quality because I started thinking well you know we make all these claims about how these actors provide social goods but we know nothing about how they how well they actually do it, so why don't we go in and measure this and also what are the implications for everyday people and how are people accessing services when they are supplied by actors that are not the state which you know however flawed the state might be in many places at least in theory has a mandate to serve all, has a public mandate, whereas many of these actors are not constrained by that. There's nobody saying they have to. There might be social norms that make them pretend that they are or even make them do it but they are not constrained in the same sort of legal formal way as the state. So one thing that I started thinking about was is there something about the mission these organizations that affect the quality of care and and I ran a pilot study for this project in Greater Beirut in 2014 or '15 that culminated in one paper that I published with my co-author and world development a couple years ago in which we looked at this question and we don't pretend that we've nailed it and we can tell you absolutely this is you know we have we we don't have like perfect causal claims here evidence here but we found some evidence that actually the mission of the organization does affect the quality of care because different providers select into different doctors select into working in these places they're not required it's not like some you know public requirement to serve in these places so there's choice about where they go so it's possible that different places attract better doctors and it might be because some doctors that are better are more attracted to the mission of one than the other and so initially we were thinking well you know all this stuff on Islam is social service provision that's out there most likely it's those types or the religious actors that are going to recruit the best people and because those are the people that are gonna be completely mission driven and there's some work on the economics of religion that suggested this might be the case in the U.S. context and so and so forth. So we went in and we looked at actually in that study it looks like the non-sectarian, non-religious actors were getting the best doctors who were exerting themselves the most to treat patients and if you know the Lebanese political context this actually makes sense. So we started interviewing some of these doctors and people that run organizations and the thing is, in the Lebanese political context, sectarian groups and many times religious actors are linked to sectarian parties or perceived to be linked to them are viewed as corrupt. The people if look at public opinion surveys, people think that these are corrupt actors, that it's a big racket, it's all patronage based, and you know there's a lot to support those perceptions and so what this implies is that perhaps those doctors that select to work for the non-sectarian non-religious groups are the ones that are actually the most sort of altruistically minded professionally minded doctors because they can't get anything back from those groups they they have no resources, they do not have a piece of the state the way religious actors do sectarian actors do, so there's no return if you're gonna go volunteer for a secular NGO in Lebanon and I'm talking about domestic secular NGOs so none of these are internationals and so our argument was that people select into these different types of doctors select in to working in these places and that the ones that work in the secular NGOs are the ones that are the you know the the most concerned about treating the patients and not expecting anything in return and so forth and what's interesting is Stephen Brooke who's done work on Islamist social service provision in Egypt found the opposite before the Revolution and that makes sense too and so we had an argument in there about how this is bound by political context. So in the Egyptian context pre-revolution pre Morsi you know Islamic groups looked wonderful compared to the state which is the group the secular state that was viewed as corrupt and and so forth and so he ran this survey asking people about which organization for example provides better health care I think he might have published this and perspectives on politics and people uniformly reported that these fictional Islamic NGOs provided the best quality of care for healthcare and it's you know because they view them as more pure less corrupt more committed to the service and so forth in that context that makes sense it's sort of the flip side of the Lebanese context where religion was associated with patronage and corruption and so forth. So that was one area where we started going with it and we did a scale-up of this study a year and a half ago where we did a nationally representative study and so one of the things we want to do this is the last paper to be written is kind of revisit this hypothesis and we have more rigorous ways to test whether mission is driving selection into these health centers through a conjoint experiment. And so we have been working on a couple of other papers out of this one of them has to do with sort of where people - that we're revising pretty heavily right now - where people sort of in group versus out group social service access to social services so when people go to a provider not from their own religious community do they get the same quality of care. And so the two sort of empirical things that that paper structured around is one where two people select into and we show overwhelmingly that people select into their own communities to seek care but that in some cases people do go to out group communities so we interrogate the reasons why people go to in group versus out group and then we show that there is a mismatch in the quality of care that people receive depending on whether they go to one from their own community versus one from the out group. That one you know we can't show it quite as rigorously as we would like because we were not able to randomly assign people to go to health centers for ethical and logistical reasons but you know we do the best that we can with the data at hand and and then we have another paper that I'm going to talk about later today which is about the quality of care that Syrians versus Lebanese Nationals receive in these centers and we find that they actually receive equal paired despite the fact that we document prejudice by doctors against Syrians through multiple methods and we have an argument about why that's the case. So that's been one project coming out of this that sort of struck me as a result of hanging out in all of these centers and oh this is just a figure from one from that project that shows where people are selecting into so um so you can see this is a Sankey diagram that shows sort of flows and so on the left these are people patients and these are centers and you can see the thick lines are indicating that people tend to go to their own communities so, for example, this is Sunni people and this is a Sunni Center. So people tend to select into their own but you have some weird things with like lots of Sony's going to Christian centers and so forth so we're looking into that as well. I'm just rushing through all of this. So I mean more broadly you know my work is primarily on the Middle East and North Africa and I feel more comfortable working there being that I speak the languages and know a lot about history and context of the whole region earlier in my dissertation was on Morocco and Tunisia and so I've spent a lot of time in North Africa as well and a lot of time in Jordan and other places so I feel pretty comfortable across the whole region generally speaking but I've been thinking about extensions to some of the projects I'm doing in other places and so some of the work I'm doing is now in Brazil and then I'm also been doing some work in India and and this is a project that looked again at that also looks at sort of intergroup dynamics and public goods welfare so to speak and so maybe I'll just briefly mention this because it did come out of all of this thinking from that earlier project and I should say that there was a tiny little bit on India at the end of my book and I also for whatever reason seemed to be on tons of dissertation committee and book conferences for people that work on India which is great so I've learned a ton about India a 30 years. I feel like I've been vicariously studying India for a long time and so it didn't seem that crazy for me to go do work in India so this is a project that I started thinking about with two collaborators, one of whom is actually from Delhi and works on India and is a professor at Queen's University in Canada and another is a graduate student in my department and and so we started thinking about not these kinds of welfare goods that get delivered by agencies, you know like health centers or schools, we started thinking about the stuff that people have to coordinate at the neighborhood level that requires cooperation and so we did a lot of qualitative work in collaboration with the Center for Policy Research in Delhi trying to figure out a bunch of things that helped us set up this project but we essentially wanted to look at the conditions under which people collaborate at the community level to supply some kind of public good and we were interested first in whether certain accountability mechanisms that we introduced through survey experiment would push people to cooperate more fully around the provision of public goods and secondly whether we saw variation in Hindus and Muslims and we were interested in that variation of Hindus and Muslims because you have a dominant Hindu majority and now I think it's safe to say a pretty persecuted Muslim minority, particularly in the current political climate, and so we were interested to see if there were different responses across communities to these accountability mechanisms so working with the CPR in Delhi we came up with the idea of working on drain cleanage and it's truly a horrific problem and it's a good public good in quotes for us to work on because it really does require collaboration in order to keep drains clean. So it's a huge problem in slum communities. You have these gullies that run through slum communities and all kinds of disgusting stuff that I'm not going to describe runs down them all kinds of refuse they smell terribly and they're literally these gullies outside of people's one-room dwellings and so people have a real interest in cleaning these things and if you clean yours it doesn't make a difference if the person upstream doesn't, right? So it requires a lot of coordination and the state does not take responsibility for what's going on inside the slum. It will sort of do the periphery but it won't take responsibility for what's going on inside, so that's what we looked at and basically we we're looking at whether accountability mechanisms move people and whether this varies and so what we found and we're just we've just presented this paper and I think we're finalizing it to send out soon is that Hindus don't really respond so much to the accountability mechanisms but Muslims do and we have some arguments about what's going on there but I think a lot of it has to do with lack of trust in government institutions but also fear of looking bad when you are a persecuted minority so a desire to show that you are contributing to the communal good and not attract negative attention to yourself. So we've been trying to look at this with some of the quantitative data that we have and we can definitely show that trust seems to mediate some of this and also some of the qualitative data that we had in working with the Center for Policy Research there. And then I think I only have a few minutes left so maybe I'll skip over this right now.

[Kevan Harris]: Is there any questions you want? If you want none, you should keep talking.

[audience laughter]

[Melani Cammett]: Okay. Okay, alright so I'm gonna skip over this I've just been doing a lot of work recently on sort of the role that religion plays in political behavior and also the role of maybe I'll just say a few words about this. So you know doing all this work on welfare goods and the politics of distribution I got sort of interested in clientelism and patronage and certainly a lot of us who work on the Middle East think that clientelism and patronage is a big deal in the region, and I know this is a big deal in other regions as well, but also because I did all these interviews and the team of graduate students I was working with did all these interviews I started to think it's really not as big of a deal as we think it is and that there's a lot of other stuff going on that political scientists who work on the Middle East are missing in terms of the micro politics of why people are supporting politicians and so forth and so two things the main thing that came to mind for me was fear and sectarian hate speech. Coming right out of the ethnic politics instrumentalist approaches, I started thinking you know surely in the context of political violence, in the context of politicians who are using hate speech against out-groups, that's gonna affect people's political behavior so we wanted to test a bunch of other things like whether there's effective religion net of these material benefits and so forth so that was the logic behind that project and so we've been working on this and finding that actually clientelism is not the only game in town and that religion moves people in and of itself and how it seems to have an effect on people's propensity to support politicians. But interestingly, we're not finding that much effect of hate speech and fear mongering and so I have some ideas about why that might be the case. I thought for sure that would be the case based on theory and you know just talking to people in the street and at least in our survey which is based on a conjoint experiment we're not finding that and so I you know you could maybe argue it's partly an artifact of the design and so forth I could get into the details but I think there's something more going on here. So let me just wrap up by saying you know a few words about the half-baked ideas that I have right now maybe you guys all have some brilliant insights and you can share them with me so they'll be slightly more baked. So I have been you know teaching Middle East politics and giving lectures on what's going on in Syria and elsewhere for a number of years and and it occurs to me that we as I said earlier know a heck of a lot about how the Syrian war, which had nothing or very little to do with sect, became sectarian eyes and we could say the same thing about Iraq we could say the same about any thousands of other places, right? But I started to think we just don't know that much about how the stuff comes down and one thing that people have increasingly recognized is that even if the root cause of a grievance is not religion and sect it often acquires meaning through the course of a conflict, right? We know this from social psychology and in other ways as well so these categories become meaningful to people and they're hard to dislodge and so I started thinking about you know what do we know about how this stuff comes down because we don't know that much at least for the Middle East and I wanted to see what do we know about the rest of the world. So I'm actually teaching a class right now on this. This is a wonderful way to learn things, is to teach things as you well know, and so from what I found so far there's very few cases in the world of where things got hyper politicized resulted in violence ethnic or religious cleavages that have come down and you know are at peace but I would love to know your cases if you have them. I've been reading a lot about early modern Europe and Protestant Catholic divisions which has been interesting and we've been reading this in my class, which is where I get the word toleration from, borrowing from a book on early modern Europe by Kaplan, Benjamin Kaplan and and so I've been thinking a little bit about what what you know historians are arguing. My colleague Jamal Crawford are is telling me to read ??? book, so Historian Empires of Difference, I think, or Historian Empire of Difference. So there's more historical work I need to read.

[Kevan Harris]: She's a sociologist by the way.

[Melani Cammett]: Oh right sorry sorry. Got to keep my disciplinary categories right. Okay so you know I this is the question I want to look at like why is it that some places become you know at least established what we might call toleration if not kumbaya, right? You know "get along" after serious violence ostensibly waged along these lines and there are people that are writing about this and I think they have lots of valuable contributions. Some of them are sort of long-term historical accounts like ??? recent work, sociologists but I think also political scientist, and there's you know all this work on institutional approaches you know like ??? and Horowitz and all this stuff and then there's a lot of work coming out now based on field experiments that try to introduce manipulations and some communities but not others and see their effects on tolerance and so I think all of these are really valuable but they still don't each one of them and I don't I don't have time to go into what I think are the shortcomings into these approaches. I still think there's questions to be answered and so I've been thinking you know early thoughts about research design and I've come to the conclusion that it has to be sub-national, that there's just too many moving parts to do some kind of cross-national work on this, but maybe sub-national in multiple places so of course Lebanon is a great case especially because the war ended officially in 1990 so enough time has passed Bosnia-Herzegovina is another case I'm thinking of and I've done some work there before and still thinking. But I think I would like to look at through largely observational data what it is about communities that underwent violence in the name of let's say Sunni, Shia, or Christian, Muslim, or whatever the cleavage might be that some of them are able to sort of reduce it, bring it down, and actually have you know some measure of tolerance and intergroup reconciliation in these communities after enough time has passed and I'm working on developing a number of ideas about how you would measure this how would you know toleration when you see it and so forth but it strikes me that that's a question that's worth asking because you know it's a horrible moment that people are living through we know a lot about how things got ratcheted up but it's you know really really hard to think about how to bring it down you know especially when we're not looking in terms of centuries of structural factors that change gradually over time but we're trying to think of more proximate factors that may have contributed to this. So that's the the beginning stages and sort of an overview of this kind of lineage of questions that I've been seizing upon really because of this New York Times article in 2003 so thank you.

[applause]