Bio
Lisel Hintz is Assistant Professor of European and Eurasian Studies at SAIS Europe
Professor Hintz studies the arenas in which struggles over various forms of identity – national, ethnic, religious, gender – take place. Her regional focus is on Turkey and its relations with Europe, the US, and the Middle East.
Her first book with Oxford University Press (2018) examines how contestation over national identity spills over to shape and be shaped by foreign policy. Her current book project, under contract with Cambridge University Press, investigates Turkey’s state-society struggles over identity in the pop culture sphere.
Professor Hintz contributes to
Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, War on the Rocks, The Boston Globe, and
BBC World Service, as well as to academic and policy discussions on Turkey’s increasing authoritarianism, opposition dynamics, foreign policy shifts, and identity-related topics including Kurdish, Alevi, and gender issues.
Professor Hintz received her PhD in Political Science from George Washington University, was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University's Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and was Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University.
For a recent curriculum vitae including a full list of publications,
see personal website.
Courses
- Politics of Protest in Europe and Eurasia
This class provides students with an in-depth exploration of the motivations behind, strategies of, and societal changes produced by various instances of collective mobilization across Europe and Eurasia. Some of the main questions we seek to answer throughout this course are: Along what lines of grievance do social movements form? Why do people choose to participate in collective mobilization given threats of reprisal by the state apparatus? Under what conditions do protests succeed and fail? What role does violence play in these outcomes? What explains the rise of far-right movements in Europe’s most democratic countries? Thinking comparatively, we consider whether conditions from particular movements be generalized to a wider universe of cases. Can studying “leaderless” anti-government protests in Turkey help us understand youth movements in Sweden? Do protest dynamics in Europe and Eurasia differ from elsewhere in the world?
- Conflicts and Cultures in Contemporary Turkey
This course takes a deep dive into many of Turkey’s domestic and regional conflicts to understand the issues, actors, and power dynamics at play. We focus on cases since 2002, but draw from legacies including Ottoman collapse, Turkey’s Cold War experiences, impacts of military coups, and spillover effects of the first Gulf War. While we examine so-called cultural conflicts within Turkey and in foreign policy – Kurdish issues, the role of Islam in politics, gender struggles, clashes with Egypt and Israel over Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas ties – we also gain unique perspective on these issues by viewing them through a pop culture lens. We acquire new tools for studying conflicts in various forms by analyzing films, TV, music, novels, and sports, as well as academic sources. By treating pop culture as a data source, we gain access to debates we otherwise wouldn't have, especially when studying in a US institution. In addition to providing an entertaining lens for considering how actors view conflicts in and around Turkey, pop culture is also a site of struggles among rivals. Take Gulf countries’ responses to Turkish support of Qatar during the Gulf Cooperation Council crisis: Saudi Arabia banned wildly popular Turkish soap operas, and UAE produced a historical drama to “counter Ottoman tyranny.” Or consider the Ministry of National Defense's use of music videos to sell Turkey’s naval activity in the Eastern Mediterranean and military incursions in Syria to domestic publics. Or the role Istanbul soccer fans played in sustaining the 2013 Gezi Park Protests, using their highly mobilized networks and experience in clashing with rivals in the stands to defend protesters against police crackdown. Political actors at the highest levels clearly take the power of pop culture seriously. As students seeking deeply informed, multi-faceted, policy-relevant expertise in Turkey’s internal and external conflicts, we will as well.
