As the world commemorates the one year anniversary of the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, an ongoing research project at the Institute, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, seeks to offer a new perspective on the crisis of the state in the region.

The project “States, Minorities and Conflicts in the Middle East” is a comparative study of the durability of states, regimes and dissident movements in Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey (1948–2003). Jordi Tejel Gorgas, Swiss National Science Foundation Research Professor, and PhD students Hassan Thuillard and Murat Yilmaz have been carrying out the multi-archival research and interviews in Northern Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan as well as in Europe since 2010. The project will come to a close in 2014.

“States, Minorities and Conflicts in the Middle East” consists of observing and comparing three case studies: the Kurdish movement in Iraq and Turkey; the leftist movement in Turkey (largely animated by “minority” members, namely Alevis) and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a non-minority movement).
The researchers seek to emphasize the political ingenuity of the states, and modes of construction and stabilisation of the dissident movements in the long term through the study of a specific site of interaction – the university milieu – between the states, political movements, student organisations, professors, state employees and educational institutions.

More information is available on the project's website.

Jordi Tejel is currently a Grant-holding Professor with the Institute's International History department. His position is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He has written books on the history of Iraq as well as Turkish Kurds in exile. His main research interests include modern history, state/society relations, and state-building in the Middle East. He has PhDs from the University of Fribourg and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.