Cihan Tugal

Professor

Research Interests

Political sociology; Social movements; Islam and the Middle East; Social theory; Religion; Culture; Global and transnational sociology; Economic sociology and development; Comparative and historical sociology

Cihan Tuğal studies three interlocking dynamics: 1) capitalism’s generation and destruction of communities, livelihoods, and places; 2) the implosion of representative democracy; 3) the crisis of liberal ethics. His ongoing research focuses on populism and neoliberalism in the United States and the Middle East. He is also initiating a team project to study the ecological crisis of capitalism, with special emphasis on the role of labor and community struggles in developing sustainable energy.

Tuğal’s most recent book, Caring for the Poor (2017, Routledge), examines the emergence, globalization, and decline of liberal ethics by focusing on charity, philanthropy, and welfare. The book builds on a Maussian analysis of the gift, as well as Polanyian, Marxian, Bourdieusian, and Foucaultian theorizations of charity. Tuğal has published offshoots of his larger project on welfare ethics in the American Journal of Sociology, Qualitative Sociology, and Rethinking Marxism. His ongoing work explores ethical, religious, and spiritual alternatives to the rationalization and individualization of care and wellbeing.

Three articles on the global uprisings of 2009-2013 provide a snapshot of Tuğal’s work on capitalism and politics (see below: “Elusive Revolt”, "Decline of the Monopoly of Legitimate Violence," and “Resistance Everywhere”). Marketization, uneven growth, increasing ineffectiveness of American hegemony, and decimation of middle classes have undermined the (liberal-conservative) mainstream and incited revolt. As Tuğal’s collaborative work with De Leon and Desai emphasizes, political creativity (or lack thereof) thoroughly shapes what kind of a route societies take in response to such turbulence. For now, the American far right has scored (important but) restricted victories as a result of this global chaos (see below: "The Counter-Revolution’s Long March"). His earlier books unpacked similar processes in Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Tunisia (Passive Revolution, Stanford University Press; and The Fall of the Turkish Model, Verso).

He has also written extensively in Turkish.

Representative Publications

Books

Caring for the Poor

2017 Caring for the Poor: Islamic and Christian Benevolence in a Liberal World

2016. The Fall of the Turkish Model: How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism. Verso.

(Translated to German and Turkish)

2009 Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism, Stanford University Press
- (Translated to Turkish, 4th edition, with a new Preface)

Edited Volumes

2015 Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society, Stanford University Press. (Co-edited with Cedric de Leon and Manali Desai)

Journal Articles

Forthcoming "The spiritual transformation of giving: generosity’s constitution of the self and community in post-religious society" Social Compass
2020 “Urban Symbolic Violence Re-Made: Spatial Struggles in Istanbul.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Published first online. DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12853
2020 “The Counter-Revolution’s Long March: The American Right’s Shift from Primitive to Advanced Leninism.” Critical Sociology 46/3: 343-358.
2017 “The Uneven Neoliberalization of Good Works: Islamic Charitable Fields and Their Impact on Diffusion.” American Journal of Sociology 123/2: 426-464.
2016 “Faiths with a Heart and Heartless Religions: Devout Alternatives to the Merciless Rationalization of Charity.” Rethinking Marxism 28/3-4: 418-437.
2015 "Elusive revolt: The contradictory rise of middle-class politics." Thesis Eleven 130/1: 74-95.
2013 “Resistance Everywhere: The Gezi Revolt in Global Perspective.”New Perspectives on Turkey 49: 157-172.
2013 “Contesting Benevolence: Market Orientations among Muslim Aid Providers in Egypt,” Qualitative Sociology 36/2: 141-159.
2012 “Democratic Janissaries? Turkey’s Role in the Arab Spring,” New Left Review 76: 5-24. (Translated to Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese and Turkish)
2012 “Serbest Meslek Sahibi”: Neoliberal Subjectivity among Istanbul’s Popular Sectors, New Perspectives on Turkey 46: 65-93.
2012 "Fight or Acquiesce? Religion and Political Process in Turkey's and Egypt's Neoliberalizations" Development and Change 43(1): 23–51.
2009 "The Urban Dynamism of Islamic Hegemony: Absorbing Squatter Creativity in Istanbul," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 29(3): 423-437.
2009 "Political Articulation: Parties and the Constitution of Cleavages in the United States, India, and Turkey" (with De Leon and Desai) Sociological Theory, 27(3): 193-219
2009 "Transforming everyday life: Islamism and social movement theory," Theory and Society 38(5): 423-458.
2008 "The Greening of Istanbul", New Left Review 51: 64-80.
2007 "NATO's Islamists: Hegemony and Americanization in Turkey", New Left Review 44: 5-34.
2006 "The Appeal of Islamic Politics: Ritual and Dialogue in a Poor District of Turkey", Sociological Quarterly 47(2): 245-273.
2002 "Islamism in Turkey: Beyond Instrument and Meaning," Economy and Society31(1): 85-111.

Book Chapters

2017. “The Decline of the Monopoly of Legitimate Violence and the Return of Non-State Warriors.” Pp. 77–92 in The Transformation of Citizenship, Volume 3: Struggle, Resistance and Violence, edited by Juergen Mackert and Bryan S. Turner. London and New York: Routledge.
2015 (with de Leon Desai) “Political Articulation: The Structured Creativity of Parties.” Pp. 1-35 in Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society, edited by Cedric de Leon, Manali Desai, and Cihan Tugal. Stanford: Stanford University Press
2015 “Religious Politics, Hegemony, and the Market Economy: Parties in the Making of Turkey's Liberal-Conservative Bloc and Egypt's Diffuse Islamization,” in Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society, Stanford University Press.
2014 “Gülenism: The Middle Way or Official Ideology?” pp. 50-64 in Umut Özkırımlı (ed.) The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #occupygezi, Palgrave.
2013 “Conservatism, victorious: Islam and the retrenchment of the secular Turkish state,” pp. 109-133 in Asef Bayat (ed.) Post-Islamism at Large, Oxford University Press.
2011 “The Islamic Making of a Capitalist Habitus: the Turkish Sub-Proletariat’s Turn to the Market,” Economic Sociology of Work 22: 85-11.
2007 "Memories of Violence, Memoirs of Nation: 1915 and the Construction of Armenian Identity," in Esra Özyürek (ed.) Politics of Public Memory, Syracuse University Press.

Review essays

2017 “An unmoving wall or a shifting one? The American right's deep emotional politics and its emaciated counterpart.” The British Journal of Sociology 68/1: 137–142.
2016. "Neoliberal populism as a contradictory articulation.” European Journal of Sociology 57/3: 466-470.
2012 "Intermittent revolution: the road to a hybrid socialism," Socio-Economic Review 10/2: 382-386
2005 "State and Society in the Study of Islam: Discontents of a Dichotomy," New Perspectives on Turkey 31: 121-134.