Lisel Hintz, Ph.D.
Lhintz1@jhu.edu
Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)
About Me:
Dr. Lisel Hintz is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. Her first book, Identity Politics Inside Out: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Policy in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2018) investigates how contestation over various forms of identity (e.g. ethnic, religious, regional, gender) spills over from domestic politics to shape, and be shaped by, foreign policy. Her current book project (under contract with Cambridge University Press) examines state-society struggles over identity in Turkey through the lens of pop culture. Dr. Hintz’s work is also published in European Journal of International Relations, Nationalities Papers, International Journal of Turkish Studies, Oxford Handbook of Turkish Politics, Survival, and Project on Middle East Political Science Series. She 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. After receiving her Ph.D. in Political Science from George Washington University in 2015, Dr. Hintz was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. At SAIS she teaches courses including Psychology and Decision-Making in Foreign Policy, Politics of Protest in Europe and Eurasia, Comparative Politics, and Reading European Politics through Pop Culture.
Research Interests
Middle East & North African Politics
Foreign Policy
Religion & Politics
Non-Democratic Regimes
Race, Ethnicity and Politics
Identity Politics
Nationalism, National Identity
Kurdish Politics
Protest Politics
Authoritarianism
Foreign Policy Analysis
Popular Culture Politics
Countries of Interest
Turkey
My Research:
Dr. Lisel Hintz is Assistant Professor of International Relations and European Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. After receiving her Ph.D. in Political Science from George Washington University she was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her first book, Identity Politics Inside Out: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Policy in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2018) investigates how contestation over various forms of identity (e.g. ethnic, religious, gender, regional) spills over from domestic politics to shape, and be shaped by, foreign policy. Her current book project examines state-society struggles over identity in Turkey through the lens of pop culture, including TV. Dr. Hintz’s work is published in Survival, European Journal of International Relations, International Journal of Turkish Studies, Project on Middle East Political Science Series, and Turkish Policy Quarterly. She has contributed to War on the Rocks, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post (Monkey Cage), The Boston Globe, and BBC World Service, as well as to government, think tank, and academic discussions on Turkey’s increasingly personalistic authoritarianism, opposition and protest dynamics, foreign policy shifts, and Kurdish, Alevi, and gender issues.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
What role do nationally celebrated holidays play for groups that are not considered—or do not consider themselves—to be part of the majority nation of a state? What function do holidays specific to minority group cultures serve under regimes that discriminate against those groups? This article explores holidays as a forum for contestation for the national identity proposals promulgated by the state in repressive regimes. We argue that national holidays are meaningful sites of identity contestation for four reasons: the role of holidays in heightening identity salience, the malleability of identity narratives, the relative lack of institutional barriers to acts of celebration, and the significance of refusing to participate in celebrations. We collected the data through interviews and participant observation of the Hui in China and the Kurds in Turkey. We employ ethnographic observation and intertextual analysis to compare these identity narratives. We find that the Hui legitimize their group’s existence by co-opting the traditional Spring Festival, or by outwardly insisting they are not celebrating while still engaging in festivities. In contrast, Turkey’s Kurds resist the government’s co-optation of the spring celebration of Newroz as a Turkish national holiday.
Turkish diplomacy vis-à-vis Germany as well as Russia and Israel appears to reflect a transactional trend in Ankara’s foreign policy.
Turkey’s Islamist-rooted Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) aggressively pursued European Union accession as a primary pillar of foreign policy, only to swing sharply away from the West in subsequent years. Actor- and party-based Islamist identity approaches cannot account for Turkey’s initial European Union-centric orientation, while domestic politics and economic arguments fail to explain the timing of the shift eastward and its domestic repercussions. Examining the advantages that foreign policy offers as an alternative arena in which elites can politicize identity debates helps to distill this complexity. This article argues that elites choose to take their national identity contests to the foreign policy arena when identity gambits at the domestic level are blocked. By taking its pursuit of hegemony for Ottoman Islamism “outside” through aggressive European Union accession measures, the Justice and Development Party could weaken domestic challengers supporting a competing, Republican Nationalist proposal for identity, and broaden support for Ottoman Islamism at home. The theory of identity hegemony developed here thus explains the counter-intuitive finding that Turkey’s European Union-oriented policy helped make possible the rise of Ottoman Islamism. Turkey offers an ideal empirical window onto these dynamics because of recent and dramatic shifts in the dynamics of its public identity debates, and because Turkey’s identity is implicated in multiple international roles, such as North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally, European Union candidate country, Organization of Islamic Cooperation member, and aspirant regional power broker. The framework developed fills a gap in existing scholarship by closing the identity–foreign policy circle, analytically linking the spillover of national identity debates into foreign policy with the changes in the contours of these debates produced by their contestation in this alternative arena.
Books Written:
The trajectory of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule offers an ideal empirical window into puzzling shifts in Turkey's domestic politics and foreign policy. The policy transformations under its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan do not align with existing explanations based on security, economics, institutions, or identity. In Identity Politics Inside Out, Lisel Hintz teases out the complex link between identity politics and foreign policy using an in-depth study of Turkey. Rather than treating national identity as cause or consequence of a state's foreign policy, she repositions foreign policy as an arena in which contestation among competing proposals for national identity takes place. Drawing from a broad array of sources in popular culture, social media, interviews, surveys, and archives, she identifies competing visions of Turkish identity and theorizes when and how internal identity politics becomes externalized. Hintz examines the establishment of Republican Nationalism in the wake of imperial collapse and examines failed attempts made by those challenging its Western-oriented, anti-ethnic, secularist values with alternative understandings of Turkishness. She further demonstrates how the Ottoman Islamist AKP used the European Union accession process to weaken Republican Nationalist obstacles in Turkey, thereby opening up space for Islam in the domestic sphere and a foreign policy targeted at achieving leadership in the Middle East. By showing how the "inside out" spillover of national identity debates can reshape foreign policy, Identity Politics Inside Out fills a major gap in existing scholarship by closing the identity-foreign policy circle.
Book Chapters:
This chapter provides an overview of Turkey’s foreign policy toward the Middle East from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the present day. Its thematic focus includes institutional legacies of imperial rule, Cold War alliance dynamics, ethnic and religious/sectarian politics, and strategies of economic development. It suggests that an analytical focus on identity contestation between competing versions of Turkishness—Republican Nationalism and Ottoman Islamism—that prescribe very different foreign policy orientations helps to explain the dramatic shift toward a highly activist role in the Middle East in the mid-2000s. Applying this conceptual framework, the discussion highlights the key influential factors and inflection points shaping bilateral ties with the most prominent states, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Syria, as well as non-state actors, including various Kurdish and Palestinian entities.