Why have many women in the Middle East resorted to increasingly conservative modes of dress in recent decades? And what happens after a political regime rapidly collapses leaving society in near total chaos as happened in Iraq in 2003? Dr. David Patel, a junior research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, answers these questions and accounts for the rise and success of ISIS by using a political-economic approach to religious institutions and behavior. He links these various topics through the importance of social coordination, signaling, and common knowledge to a society, and explains why Shiites were more successful in limiting violence and providing public goods than Sunnis were in Iraq following the US invasion in 2003.
Our conversation begins with a bit of methodological banter as Tony asks David about the various analytical tools he uses including game theory, geospatial analysis, and ethnography. These theoretical and empirical techniques are rarely employed in conjunction with one another in the social sciences, and David offers a spirited defense of his multi-disciplinary approach and notes that ethnography has received a bad rap in the field of political science. We also talk about how these tools came to be applied to the study of religion and politics in the Middle East, and David and Tony share stories about how manuscript reviewers told them to submit their work to sociology journals since what they did “wasn’t political science.”
Read Full Article »