Raphael Susewind

A. Muslim belonging in contemporary North India

Following up on my research on Muslim peace activists in Gujarat, I am now more broadly interested in what it means to be Muslim and belong as Muslim in contemporary North India; in my ongoing PhD project in Bielefeld and Oxford, I explore this theme with a case study of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. I am especially curious to see in which various ways different Muslims with their respective personal biographies navigate, combine and ignore normative discourses on Muslimness. On the way, I also intend to put a relational notion of religious belonging to an empirical test and see which insights its application might generate. Methodically, I work with longterm ethnographic fieldwork, which systematically explores the tensions between talk - what people say they do, and why - and observation - how this materializes or not - in typologizing objective. More details on this current project can be found in my Blog and in a Prezi...

B. The ambivalence of the sacred as a personal dynamic

To assume a considerable ambivalence of religion in political conflict is increasingly common among social scientists. Still, the reconstruction of this ambivalence on the micro level of indvidual agency, where religious identities and political behaviour interact, is still in its infancy - and too seldom based on actual field research. My diploma thesis in Marburg contributed to close this gap with an empirical typology of Muslim peace activists in Gujarat, India, comprising "faith based actors", "secular technocrats", "emancipating women" and "doubting professionals". Despite being interesting in a specific context, wider methodical, conceptual and empirical lessons can be drawn from this typology, which probably help in future differentiation of the "ambivalence of the sacred" hypothesis towards the personal level. One such lesson is substantial in nature: it is important to differentiate carefully between "ambivalence" and "ambiguity" as two distinct manifestations of religion's relation to violence. A second lesson is methodological: taking personal diversity seriously requires an explicit strategy of empirical typologizing in an abductive research design. More on this project can be found in the publications below, and in a Prezi...

C. Bureaucratic cultures and Indian diplomacy

This third arena of enquiry is very much the pet subject among my research interests. Here, I am interested in historically built-up bureaucratic cultures of the Indian Foreign Service and in how they might layer realist notions of International Relations. My Master's dissertation in Oxford explored the Nehruvian notion of an "integrated service" in negotiations between India and Bangladesh over transboundary river management, and I am currently broadening this interest into wider implications of cultural undercurrents for Indian diplomacy in the South Asian environment.