Research focus — senior thesis case study on ethnoreligious nationalism where secularism, Islam, and national identity take a fundamentally different form.
Senior Thesis Context
Türkiye was one half of my undergraduate thesis, Pro Deo et Patria: The Rise of Ethnoreligious Nationalism in the 21st Century. The project examined how religious identity is mobilised in service of exclusionary political projects, using the United States and Türkiye as comparative cases rather than treating either as self-explanatory.
Why Türkiye
The Turkish case mattered because secularism, Islam, and national identity intersect there in a configuration fundamentally different from the Anglo-American contexts that dominate much public debate. That difference made the comparison analytically useful: it helped distinguish what was structural about ethnoreligious nationalism from what depended on local history, institutions, and political language.
This thesis examined the factors driving the resurgence of ethnoreligious nationalism in the United States and Türkiye, treating these as structurally comparable cases rather than isolated phenomena. The central argument was that ethnoreligious nationalism in both contexts draws on a similar mechanism: the fusion of religious identity with national belonging, such that religious adherence becomes a marker of authentic citizenship and deviation from it becomes grounds for exclusion.