Lisel Hintz
Assistant Professor of International Relations
Johns Hopkins University
School of Advanced International Studies
Spanning International Relations and comparative politics, my research examines how contestation over various identities shapes politics from the international to the subnational level. Trained as political scientist, I draw methodological tools from anthropology and media studies to study identity dynamics with contextual nuance and analytical rigor; many of my recent publications and current projects aim at "audio-visualizing" the political science toolkit. 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/civilizationalism - that also spill over to impact transnational mobilization, foreign and defense policy, and grand strategy-making.
My work on identity centers around three intersecting nodes of inquiry: the international-domestic nexus, politics of media at home and abroad, and ethnic politics under authoritarianism. Within the first, my 2016 article in European Journal of International Relations analyses how rising political actors can wage their battle for “identity hegemony” by selectively complying with international institutions’ accession criteria when blocked by political veto players with identity “red lines” back home. My first book, Identity Politics Inside Out (Oxford University Press, 2018), expands that article’s theoretical scope beyond international institutions to include diasporic communities and transnational civil society as foreign policy targets in identity battles. Adding an identity lens to defense policy, my 2022 co-authored article in Security Studies 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. In ongoing work, my co-authored monograph project, under contract with OUP, is the first to theorize populist grand strategy. The book adds a comparative lens on grand strategy by analyzing how populism's Us vs. Them narratives, "great history" narratives, and revisionist worldviews shape grand strategy-making and implementation; an article-length iteration of the project that I recently presented at APSA conceptualizes populist-led regional powers as "righteous risers."
In my second research area, my 2025 article in Politics & Gender draws from over 600 hours of cooking show content and an original dataset on media ownership to unpack how TV food programming functions as a platform of conservative gender edutainment for governments. Further, my 2025 article in Perspectives on Politics on "film-making the nation great again" presents an original dataset of over 11,000 regime-produced videos in analyzing audiovisual instrumentalizations of history as a legitimation strategy. A separate project using this dataset introduces an audiovisual rally 'round the screen approach to studying foreign threat construction. A book manuscript near completion – Fight Scenes: Pop Culture as Political Battleground, contracted with Cambridge University Press and expected in 2026 – conceptualizes sites of pop culture production, regulation, and dissemination as an asymmetric battleground on which authoritarian regimes wage politically significant struggles against international and domestic rivals. In a 2021 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. Planned and ongoing projects include constructing a global dataset of regime regulations on TV, film, and streaming content that adds an audiovisual component to IR research on sanctions, and web-scraping social media references to TV dramas in a study of “low risk” oppositional discourse.
In my third research area, my 2024 co-authored article in Democratization 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 China specialist 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.
Within my regional area of focus, Turkey is a highly culturally diverse and intellectually puzzling state to examine, 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. In addition to my academic work, I also have contributed to Foreign Policy, 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 psychology and foreign policy decision-making, subnational diplomacy, comparative politics, protests and social movements, and conflicts and cultures in Turkey. I look forward to teaching courses on popular geopolitics, "tech nationalism" among rising powers, and the role of media in international conflict. 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/working on 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 my 2024 PS article; I very much hope the model will spread. We finished our 126th week on 12 September 2025. Please get in touch if you or your students are interested!
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