Lisel Hintz
Assistant Professor of International Relations
Johns Hopkins University
School of Advanced International Studies
Spanning the intersection of comparative politics and International Relations, my research examines how contestation over various identities shapes politics at multiple levels. Trained as political scientist, I draw methodological tools from anthropology and media studies to study identity dynamics with nuance and rigor. My regional focus on Turkey and its varied neighborhoods provides numerous cases of identity contestation for comparative analysis - e.g., Kurdish and Alevi issues, political Islam, anti-Westernism, neo-imperialism - that also spill over to impact foreign policy.
My work on identity centers around three nodes of inquiry: the domestic-international nexus, ethnic politics under authoritarianism, and political struggles in various forms of media. My 2022 co-authored article, for example, explains how the nationalist appeal of the ruling AKP's anti-US, counter-hegemonic messaging on its Russian S-400 missiles made giving up even a non-operational weapons system prohibitively costly. My 2018 book Identity Politics Inside Out: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Policy in Turkey (Oxford University Press) analyzes how the AKP used Turkey's EU accession process to weaken institutional obstacles to its Ottoman Islamist understanding of Turkish identity, opening space for a more activist foreign policy in former imperial territories while simultaneously consolidating its rule at home. Turning to grand strategy, my co-authored book project under review at OUP adds a comparative lens with a focus on populism.
Within the second research area, my 2024 co-authored article develops the term permissive prejudice to explain how ruling parties choose harsher, more visible repression strategies against stigmatized minorities, while using behind-the-scenes repression against ethnic majorities. In a 2021 article in Nationalities Papers with Allison Quatrini, we examine ethnic politics from an oppositional perspective. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis of media content, we study holidays as symbolic, meaningful, but malleable focal points of identity politics using the celebrations of Spring festivals by Turkey’s Kurds and China’s Hui minority.
My study of media forms the third node of my work and much of my future research. My second solo-authored book – Fight Scenes, contracted with Cambridge University Press and expected in 2025 – conceptualizes sites of pop culture production, regulation, and dissemination as an asymmetric battleground on which authoritarian regimes wage politically significant struggles against rivals. In a recent award-winning article in British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, I examine pop culture content as “creative resistance” tool in subverting ruling party claims, bolstering Ingroup identity, and attracting viral attention. Further, in three papers using an original dataset of over 13,000 YouTube regime videos, I and two co-authors “audiovisualise” the authoritarian toolkit to examine foreign threat inflation, personality cult construction, and instrumentalizations of history. Ongoing and future projects include constructing a global dataset of regime regulations on LGBTQ+ streaming content, analysing cooking shows as gender construction platforms, and web-scraping social media references to TV dramas in a study of “low risk” pre-election oppositional discourse.
Turkey is a highly culturally diverse and intellectually puzzling state, from aspects of civil-military relations to ethnic and gender politics to regional (in)security. Understanding its domestic and foreign policies is thus vital for many reasons, and demands innovative forms of analysis that can be communicated to academic audiences, policy communities, and university classrooms. With this aim, I speak and write widely on Turkey’s relations in its complex neighborhood as well as with the US and the EU, the Syrian refugee crisis, Kurdish and Alevi issues, and the ruling AKP’s increasingly authoritarian grip on Turkish politics and society. My academic work includes publications in Democratization, Security Studies, PS: Political Science and Politics, European Journal of International Relations, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Nationalities Papers, International Journal of Turkish Studies, Survival, and Project on Middle East Political Science Series. I also have contributed to Foreign Policy, the Washington Post's Monkey Cage, Boston Globe, War on the Rocks, BBC World News, and other media outlets as well as to government and think-tank panels and publications.
I am thrilled to work with Johns Hopkins SAIS students in teaching courses on foreign policy decision-making, comparative politics, protests and social movements, the politics of pop culture, and Turkey's cultural politics. Prior to joining SAIS, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University in AY 2015-16 and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University in AY 2016-17.
I am also proud to run a Zoom writing solidarity group that hosts 10 to 12 two-hour sessions per week for students and scholars from the MENA region. Following the devastating February 2023 earthquakes that killed over 50,000 people, I created a writing solidarity Zoom group to provide community for students and scholars from Turkey and Syria. Seeing the progress group members have made, I expanded the group to include SAIS PhD students and scholars working in/on/from MENA. Some participants have joined once, some over 100 times; some have finished PhD dissertations, some have published articles they've written in our sessions. I provide a blueprint of the group for others to use in the PS article; I very much hope the model will spread. We finished our 93rd week on 10 January 2025.
Click for info on my first book, out from Oxford University Press November 2018
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Click to watch my panel on art and authoritarianism on Turkey with rapper and "Susamam" creator Sarp Palaur aka Şanışer
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Speaking on the Syrian refugee crisis at Cornell Law School
The PBS Great Decisions documentary "Turkey: A Partner in Crisis"
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Speaking live on Turkey's coup attempt with Knowledge@Wharton
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Hosting former opposition MP and humanitarian activist Şafak Pavey
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Moderating a panel on domestic politics at MEI's 8th annual Turkey conference.
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Teaching my class on Turkey and the Middle East at Cornell
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Click the photo for my podcast on Turkey's constitutional referendum with POMEPS director Marc Lynch