Egor Lazarev has offered us a book of uncommon ambition and erudition. At its core, State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya explores how elites and ordinary citizens pursue their interests by weighing the costs and benefits of using alternative legal frameworks in postwar Chechnya. By describing how politicians encourage nonstate legal remedies to build political coalitions—and how everyday Chechens engage in forum shopping when trying to manage their own legal issues—Lazarev teaches us about the challenges associated with the extension of state legal institutions in the wake of prolonged, nationalist conflict. Although Lazarev treats his exploration of legal pluralism as the theoretical framing for the book, such a reading belies what I view as his primary empirical contribution: a meticulous exploration of gender politics in the North Caucasus. In this review, I describe Lazarev’s arguments about elite and citizen legal strategies, discuss his understanding of gender disputes in a postconflict Muslim society, and offer a provocation for future research that would situate the study of Chechnya in a broader literature on autocratic politics.

How are harmful social practices brought to an end? Female genital cutting (FGC) is extremely common among ever-married women in Egypt, but the practice has declined among younger women and girls. While much of the recent literature on abatement of FGC has focused on individual-level determinants of a mother's choice to circumcise her daughters, we focus on meso-level factors, particularly norm change within religious communities and attitude formation within families. We find differential FGC trends across Muslim and Coptic Christian communities as well as an effect of the gender of a woman's first-born child—an exogenous variable in Egypt where pre-natal sex selection is rare—on attitudes toward FGC. The effect of the first-born gender varies by religion and birth cohort, however, suggesting ways in which meso-level factors interact to impact women's attitudes and associated FGC outcomes.

Scholars have long argued that leaders manipulate foreign policy, sometimes even initiating wars in order to enhance their domestic political position. But diversionary wars are relatively rare given the high costs of conflict. In this project, we examine data from major Syrian daily newspapers over a 30-year period (1987–2018) to explore how autocratic regimes use diversionary rhetoric. We find that before the 2011 Arab Uprisings, Syria's state-controlled media concentrated on Israel as a security and political threat. Emphasis on Israel as a diversionary threat decreased during peace negotiations between Syria and Israel, probably in a bid to prepare the Syrian public for normalization of bilateral relations. After 2011, scrutiny of Israel—and other long-standing topics of state discourse—was displaced by discussion of foreign plots and conspiracies against the Syrian state. Our analysis illustrates how authoritarian regimes make use of diversionary strategies as well as how political shocks generate discontinuities in authoritarian rhetoric.

Scholars have long sought to understand when and why the Middle East fell behind Europe in its economic development. This article explores the importance of historical Muslim trade in explaining urban growth and decline in the run-up to the Industrial Revolution. The authors examine Eurasian urbanization patterns as a function of distance to Middle Eastern trade routes before and after 1500 CE – the turning point in European breakthroughs in seafaring, trade and exploration. The results suggest that proximity to historical Muslim trade routes was positively associated with urbanization in 1200 but not in 1800. These findings speak to why Middle Eastern and Central Asian cities – which had long benefited from their central location between Europe and Asia – declined as Europeans found alternative routes to the East and opened trade opportunities in the New World.

Using data from the World Values Survey, we analyze the extent to which value consensus exists within countries. To do this, we introduce a statistical model which allows us to generate country-level measures of cultural heterogeneity. Our statistical approach models each country as a mixture of subcultures that are shared across the world. Our results demonstrate that value consensus varies substantially across countries and regions.

Holy Land Crusades were among the most significant forms of military mobilization to occur during the medieval period. Crusader mobilization had important implications for European state formation. We find that areas with large numbers of Holy Land crusaders witnessed increased political stability and institutional development as well as greater urbanization associated with rising trade and capital accumulation, even after taking into account underlying levels of religiosity and economic development. Our findings contribute to a scholarly debate regarding when the essential elements of the modern state first began to appear. Although our causal mechanisms—which focus on the importance of war preparation and urban capital accumulation—resemble those emphasized by previous research, we date the point of critical transition to statehood centuries earlier, in line with scholars who emphasize the medieval origins of the modern state. We also point to one avenue by which the rise of Muslim military and political power may have affected European institutional development.

We document a divergence in the duration of rule for monarchs in Western Europe and the Islamic world beginning in the medieval period. While leadership tenures in the two regions were similar in the 8th century, Christian kings became increasingly long lived compared to Muslim sultans. We argue that forms of executive constraint that emerged under feudal institutions in Western Europe were associated with increased political stability and find empirical support for this argument. While feudal institutions served as the basis for military recruitment by European monarchs, Muslim sultans relied on mamlukism—or the use of military slaves imported from non-Muslim lands. Dependence on mamluk armies limited the bargaining strength of local notables vis-à-vis the sultan, hindering the development of a productively adversarial relationship between ruler and local elites. We argue that Muslim societies’ reliance on mamluks, rather than local elites, as the basis for military leadership, may explain why the Glorious Revolution occurred in England, not Egypt.

While public opinion research has expanded rapidly in the Islamic world since 2001, little scholarly work has examined interviewer effects related to an enumerator's religious adherence. We find that the perceived religiosity of an interviewer impacts respondents' expressions of personal piety and adherence to Islamic cultural norms in a sample of approximately 1,200 women in Greater Cairo. Muslim women indicate that they are more religious and adherent to Islamic cultural norms when interviewed by an enumerator donning the Islamic headscarf. Conversely, members of Egypt's minority Coptic Christian community report that they are less adherent to Christianity when interviewed by a veiled enumerator. Through psychological processes of strategic self-presentation of identity and impression management, the veil may trigger Muslim respondents to express what they perceive to be socially desirable (i.e., more devout) responses; in contemporary Egypt, being perceived as pious may elicit social and economic benefits. Christians appear to deemphasize their religious identity to avoid appearing at odds with the dominant, Muslim majority to which the enumerator appears to belong. Younger, poorer and less educated women — who may be most susceptible to concerns about social desirability — show the largest effects.

The battle for public opinion in the Islamic world is an ongoing priority for U.S. diplomacy. The current debate over why many Muslims hold anti-American views revolves around whether they dislike fundamental aspects of American culture and government, or what Americans do in international affairs. We argue, instead, that Muslim anti-Americanism is predominantly a domestic, elite-led phenomenon that intensifies when there is greater competition between Islamist and secular-nationalist political factions within a country. Although more observant Muslims tend to be more anti-American, paradoxically the most anti-American countries are those in which Muslim populations are less religious overall, and thus more divided on the religious–secular issue dimension. We provide case study evidence consistent with this explanation, as well as a multilevel statistical analysis of public opinion data from nearly 13,000 Muslim respondents in 21 countries.