Raphael Susewind

A. Muslim belonging in contemporary Lucknow

After 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 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; I also include quite a bit of spatial analysis and mapping to contextualize my case studies. More on this project can be found in my Blog, a Prezi, and a mapping portal...

B. Data on religion and politics in Uttar Pradesh

A spin-off from my Lucknow project is a comprehensive dataset on religion and politics in Uttar Pradesh published under an open license. Recent transparency initiatives by the Election Commission of India allow researchers for the first time to shift the central unit of quantitative political analyses from the constituency level to that of polling booths, stations, and villages (earlier, such data had to be interpolated). At the same time, a probablistic algorithm which I developed as part of my PhD allows to infer religious demographics on the same level by exploiting the religious connotations of electors' names in the voter lists (upscaling courtesy OSC). Combining both arguably enables much more fine-grained statistical analyses of religion and politics than previously possible. More on namematching and the algorithm itself can be found in a series of blog posts, the dataset itself has its own website...

C. The ambivalence of the sacred as a personal dynamic

To assume a considerable ambivalence of religion vis-a-vis violent 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 behavior interact, is still in its infancy - and too seldom based on field research. My diploma thesis in Marburg contributed to close this gap with a typology of Muslim peace activists in Gujarat, comprising of "faith based actors", "secular technocrats", "emancipating women" and "doubting professionals". Based on their experiences captured in narrative interviews and psychometric scales, I argue that the "ambivalence of the sacred" does not merely unfold between violent and peaceful actors - as most scholars assume -, but can also be experienced within the hearts and minds of either. I further argue that one should more carefully distinguish between "ambivalence" and "ambiguity" as two distinct manifestations of religion's relation to violence - and that it pays to take personal diversity seriously right at the core of one's research design. More on this project, the typology, and my arguments can be found in my book, the publications below, a blog, and a Prezi...

D. Bureaucratic cultures and Indian diplomacy

This final 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. In my Master's dissertation in Oxford, I argued that the Nehruvian emphasis on an "integrated service" for long prevented a final agreement between India and Bangladesh over transboundary river management based on archival material (and autobiographies of diplomats in particular); currently, I am applying this idea to other examples of cultural undercurrents in Indian diplomacy vis-a-vis South Asian neighbours.