Religion and Politics in the Holy Land
About the author: Abby Fanlo is a Stanford graduate student in political science and recipient of an FSI Conference Grant, which she used in support of her travel to present her research at Eurasian Peace Science Conference in Jerusalem, Israel.
Jerusalem enjoys incredible historical significance, with respect to religion, politics, and conflict. Thus, the city provided the perfect setting for presenting a paper on the relationship between state regulation of the religious economy and civil war. This month, I traveled there for the Eurasian Peace Science Conference, held at the Hebrew University, to present such a paper. The conference included participants from a wide variety of universities across the Middle East and Eastern Europe, providing the opportunity for me to meet scholars whom I had not encountered previously. I am confident these connections will be valuable for me as I proceed in my career as a political scientist. Furthermore, given the relevance of my topic to many countries in the Eurasia region, I received valuable feedback on my research from individuals who reside in places with high state control over religious institutions.
In addition to presenting my own research, I thoroughly enjoyed attending other panels at the conference. I was introduced to a variety of ongoing research projects that will influence my work going forward, on topics ranging from the causes and repercussions of political violence to deterrence in the context of the Israel-Hamas conflict. The innovative research strategies presented by other conference attendees, particularly those that used micro-level data on violence in neighborhoods or villages, particularly inspired me. I look forward to implementing some of the ideas these presentations sparked now that I’ve returned to Stanford.
Outside of the conference, while in Israel, I had the opportunity to visit sites relevant to my research on religion, politics, and conflict. Students of war, like myself, can sometimes forget about the human impact of the data points in our research, but museums like Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Memorial Museum) and the Yitzhak Rabin center on the history of Israel were powerful reminders of the costs of international conflict, both for soldiers and civilians. While at the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem, I was reminded of the power of religion to impact relationships between individuals and states, fueling further my interest in the research I presented at the conference. Thus, one of the highlights of traveling to Israel for the Eurasian Peace Science conference was touring historical and memorial sites that underscored the importance of research on conflict resolution and peace.
