Religion and Nationalism: Identity and Behavior in a Comparative Perspective
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Natan Sachs is a CDDRL pre-doctoral fellow and a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. His primary research interest is on the formation of political cleavages and especially the politics of religious identity, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia and the Middle East. He is also interested in the use of experiments in comparative politics and has conducted extensive fieldwork in Indonesia, using experimental methods.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Natan Sachs
CDDRL Fellow 2010-2011
Speaker
Seminars
Religion, State and Multiculturalism in Israel
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Michael Karayanni, Edward S. Silver Professor of Civil Procedure and Director of the Harry and Michael Sacher Institute for Legislative Research and Comparative Law, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on private international law and inter-religious law, civil procedure, and multiculturalism. He holds an LL.D in law from the Hebrew University (2000) as well as an S.J.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, received in 2003. He is the author of "Conflicts in a Conflict" (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2012)
Event Summary
Professor Karayanni's talk addresses the question of why religious and political issues in Israel are dominated by the conflict around disproportionate funding for Jewish institutions and norms, and the implications this emphasis has on jurisdictional authority in Israel. Professor Karayanni points out that while there are 14 recognized religious communities in Israel, less than 2% of the budget for support of religious institutions goes to non-Jewish organizations. However, as a result of the relative lack of official recognition, the Israeli Supreme Court has in some cases deferred from enforcing Israeli administrative law, a practice that has afforded greater freedom to some private religious institutions such as religious schools, as Karayanni outlines demonstrates with examples from several recent court cases . He then describes how judicial freedom for some religious groups can create a "multicultural predicament" in which the autonomy allowed to minority religious groups may conflict with the best interests of more vulnerable members, such as women and children, in groups with illiberal social and judicial norms. Nonetheless, Professor Karayanni argues that the perception of being multicultural is important to the Jewish state, as it is in Egypt, Jordan, and India, where minority religious groups have similar autonomy.
A discussion session following the talk addressed such questions as: Is there any political will to divorce Jewish identity from the state and instead have it represented only through community institutions? How many Christian Palestinians live in the Palestinian Territory versus in Israel? How do they operate legally within the Palestinian community? How are minority Jewish sects treated in Israel? How would a binational state resulting in the absorption of Palestine affect these religious issues?
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Michael Karayanni
Edward S. Silver Chair in Civil Procedure; Director, The Harry and Michael Sacher Institute for Legislative Research and Comparative Law, The Hebrew University
Speaker
Seminars
Nancy Ruttenburg
Building 460, Room 418
Main Quad
Stanford University
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ruttenburg@stanford.edu
William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature
Professor of English
Professor, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
Professor, by courtesy, of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Nancy Ruttenburg is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature in the English Department at Stanford. She also holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She received the PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford (1988) and taught at Harvard, Berkeley, and most recently at NYU, where she was chair of the Department of Comparative Literature from 2002-2008. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political, religious, and literary expression in colonial through antebellum America and nineteenth-century Russia, with a particular focus on the development of liberal and non-liberal forms of democratic subjectivity. Related interests include history of the novel, novel theory, and the global novel; philosophy of religion and ethics; and problems of comparative method, especially as they pertain to North American literature and history.
Prof. Ruttenburg is the author of Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford UP, 1998) and Dostoevsky's Democracy (Princeton UP, 2008), and she has recently written on the work of J. M. Coetzee and on Melville’s “Bartleby.” Books in progress include a study of secularization in the postrevolutionary United States arising out of the naturalization of “conscience” as inalienable right, entitled Conscience, Rights, and 'The Delirium of Democracy'; and a comparative work entitled Dostoevsky And for which the Russian writer serves as a lens on the historical development of a set of intercalated themes in the literature of American modernity. These encompass self-making and self-loss (beginning with Frederick Douglass's serial autobiographies); sentimentalism and sadism (in abolitionist fiction); crime and masculinity (including Mailer's The Executioner's Song); and the intersection of race, religious fundamentalism, and radical politics (focusing on the works of James Baldwin and Marilynne Robinson). Her courses will draw from both these projects.
Prof. Ruttenburg is past president of the Charles Brockden Brown Society and has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, a University of California President's Research Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Social Science Research Council for Russian and East European Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council for Learned Societies.
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Workshop on Islam and Secularism in Contemporary Turkey
This workshop is sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Program, and co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, the Europe Center, and the Stanford Humanities Center
Stanford faculty, students, scholars and staff are welcome to attend. To RSVP, please contact medstudies@stanford.edu.
WORKSHOP SCHEDULE:
November 15th
10:30 am – Noon: Conceptual Explorations
Haldun Gulalp (Department Political Science, Yildiz Technical University)
“Rethinking Islam and Secularization in Turkey: A Durkheimian Perspective”
Ahmet Kuru (Department of Political Science, San Diego State University)
“Islamism, Secularism, and Democracy in Turkey”
2:00 pm- 3:30 pm: Managing the Difference
Aykan Erdemir (Department of Sociology, Middle East Technical University)
“Faith-based Activism for Secularism: The Transformation of Alevi Collective Action Repertoire in Turkey”
Murat Somer (Department of International Relations, Koc University; Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Princeton University)
“Islamic-Conservative and Pro-Secular Values and the Management of Ethnic Diversity and Conflict”
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm: Claiming Secularism
Umit Kurt (Department of History, Clark University)
“Military’s Perceptions of Islam and Secularism in Contemporary Turkey”
Kabir Tambar (Department of Religion, University of Vermont)
“Staging Alevi Pasts in Secular Time”
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November 16th
10: 30 am- Noon: Turkey’s “Islamists” and “Secularists” Abroad
Betul Balkan (Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Northeastern University)
“Opinions of Turkish Immigrants in Houston About Secularism and Islam in Turkey”
Zeynep Atalay (Department of Sociology, University of Maryland-College Park; The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Stanford University)
“From the Neighborhood to Umma: Global Networks of Muslim Civil Society in Turkey”
2:00 pm – 3:30 pm: Contextualizing the Turkish Case
Hootan Shambayati (Division of Public Affairs, Florida Gulf Coast University)
“Controlled Democratization, Moderate Islam, and Radical Secularism: Lessons from Turkey and their Implications for the Middle East”
Nora Fisher-Onar (Department of Politics and International Relations, Bahcesehir University; Centre for International Studies, University of Oxford)
“Vision or Cacophony?: Mixing Liberal-Democratic, Religious-Conservative, Power Political, and Ottomanist Metaphors in Contemporary Turkey”
4:00 pm- 5:30 pm: Concluding Session
Riva Kastoryano (Center for International Studies and Research, Sciences Politique)
Larry Diamond (Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Stanford University)
Stanford Humanities Center, Board Room
Workshops
Who Should Fight? The Ethics of the Draft
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- Should citizens be required to serve their country by fighting for it?
- Do we think differently about the decision to go to war when only a small number of citizens will fight it?
- Do volunteer armies and draft armies fight differently in combat?
This panel discussion focuses on the draft versus the volunteer army in the U.S. Our distinguished panelists examine "who should fight" in a democracy, focusing on the ethical dimension of a state's system of military service.
Panelists are:
David Kennedy (History, Emeritus, Stanford). Kennedy's scholarly focus is on the integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. A prolific historian, he won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in History for Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, which recounts the history of the United States in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II, and was a 1981 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in History for Over Here: The First World War and American Society, which uses the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system.
Eliot Cohen (Strategic Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies). Cohen's work focuses on diplomacy, international relations, irregular warfare, military history, military power and strategy, as well as strategic and security issues. He has served as Counselor of the U.S. Department of State, a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the Secretary of Defense, and a member of the Defense Policy Board. He also directed the U.S. Air Force's Gulf War Air Power Survey.
Jean Bethke Elshtain (Social and Political Ethics, Divinity School, The University of Chicago). Regularly named as one of America's foremost public intellectuals, Elshtain writes frequently for journals of civic opinion and lectures widely in the United States and abroad on themes of democracy, ethical dilemmas, religion and politics, and international relations. Elshtain has authored many books including Women and War; Democracy on Trial (a New York Times' notable book for 1995); and Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (named one of the best nonfiction books of 2003 by Publishers Weekly.
Oak Lounge
David Kennedy
History, Emeritus
Speaker
Stanford
Eliot Cohen
Strategic Studies
Speaker
Johns Hopkins
Jean Bethke Elshtain
Social and Political Ethics
Speaker
University of Chicago Divinity School
Scott D. Sagan
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E202
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
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ssagan@stanford.edu
The Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science
The Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Scott D. Sagan is Co-Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, and the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He also serves as Co-Chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.
Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017) with Matthew Bunn; and co-editor of The Fragile Balance of Terror (Cornell University Press, 2022) with Vipin Narang. Sagan was also the guest editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus: Ethics, Technology, and War (Fall 2016) and The Changing Rules of War (Winter 2017).
Recent publications include “Creeds and Contestation: How US Nuclear and Legal Doctrine Influence Each Other,” with Janina Dill, in a special issue of Security Studies (December 2025); “Kettles of Hawks: Public Opinion on the Nuclear Taboo and Noncombatant Immunity in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Israel”, with Janina Dill and Benjamin A. Valentino in Security Studies (February 2022); “The Rule of Law and the Role of Strategy in U.S. Nuclear Doctrine” with Allen S. Weiner in International Security (Spring 2021); “Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power?” with Benjamin A. Valentino in International Security (Fall 2020); and “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants” and “On Reciprocity, Revenge, and Replication: A Rejoinder to Walzer, McMahan, and Keohane” with Benjamin A. Valentino in Ethics & International Affairs (Winter 2019).
In 2022, Sagan was awarded Thérèse Delpech Memorial Award from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at their International Nuclear Policy Conference. In 2017, he received the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award which recognizes the scholar whose “singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency" in the international studies community. Sagan was also the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015, for his work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons and the causes of nuclear proliferation. The award, which is granted triennially, recognizes “research in any field of cognitive or behavioral science that advances understanding of issues relating to the risk of nuclear war.” In 2013, Sagan received the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009.
Co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation
CV
Document
sagan_cv_january_2026_.pdf
(273.48 KB)
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Seminars
Debating History, Democracy, Development, and Education in Conflicted Societies
The Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) has launched a multi-year collaborative project with research institutes in Europe and the Greater Middle East. First partners include the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.