Kristin E. Fabbe

Professor Fabbe is currently conducting fieldwork for a book project that focuses on how societies respond to crisis and how states seek to use modernization initiatives to strengthen social resilience and cohesion. Towards this end, she is researching local variation in response to adversity through an examination of economic shocks, austerity measures, and large demographic changes in post-crisis Greece.

Professor Fabbe’s first book, Disciples of the State?: Religion and State Building and in the Former Ottoman World, examines processes of strategic interaction between religion and the emergent machine of the sovereign state across the Middle East and Balkans. Her findings show that decisive victories for either the secular state or for religion are rare during modernization drives. Instead, across the region, religion-state arrangements have taken the form of intriguing amalgams that defy the conventional, dichotomous classification of secular vs. religious. There are two central arguments. First, states carved out more sovereign space in places like Greece and Turkey, where religious elites were integral to early centralizing reform and modernization processes. Second, region-wide structural constraints on the types of linkages that states managed to build with religion during modernization efforts have generated long-term repercussions. Fatefully, both state policies that seek to facilitate equality through the recognition of religious difference and state policies that seek to eradicate such difference have contributed to failures of liberal democratic consolidation.

Professor Fabbe’s second area of research focuses on individual and collective responses to violence and forced migration. Under this research stream, she has implemented large survey projects in Iraq, Turkey, and Morocco. Her work in Turkey tests the notion that violence begets violence by investigating how exposure to barrel bombing affects Syrian refugees’ attitudes toward peace and reconciliation. Her research in Iraq examines how legacies of violence shape combatants’ propensity to exhibit cognitive empathy and humanizing behavioral tendencies toward their enemies. Here, she also examines issues related to transitional justice and tollerance. Finally, through a nationally representative survey of Moroccan citizens, Professor Fabbe is studying determinants of anti-migrant sentiment in the global south.

In an ongoing research stream, Professor Fabbe is studying the political economy of business development in fragile societies. Her newest project in this research stream explores the opportunities for complementarities and joint ventures between Syrian and Turkish businesses in Gaziantep, Turkey. In addition, building on extensive interviews with women business owners and a large-scale survey of female-owned businesses in Northern Iraq, another study assesses how women leverage social, political, and economic resources to launch businesses despite the absence of state-directed credit or a well-defined system of individual property rights.