About this Event
Abstract: How do novel religious movements become institutionalized in new contexts? I examine the institutionalization of Salafism in sub-Saharan Africa. While existing scholarship emphasizes ideational diffusion, I highlight that movement institutionalization requires both ideas and resources and argue that external sponsorship serves as an important substitute when incumbent religious elites block local resource mobilization. In the case of Salafism, I argue that education programs, established in the early 1960s to recruit African Muslims to Arab religious institutions, created ideological entrepreneurs who catalyzed Salafi organizational development by trans- forming doctrinal commitments and connecting graduates to transnational resource networks. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design on original panel data, I find that countries experience significant increases in Salafi organizational establishment after receiving their first cohort of Arab-trained graduates. Case studies of the first Salafi organizations in Ghana and Ivory Coast demonstrate that foreign study transformed graduates’ ideological commitments and connected them to Arab resource networks they mobilized upon return. Newspaper content analysis of organizations in Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast confirms that organizations founded by Arab-trained leaders exhibit higher Salafi ideological content and maintain stronger connections to Arab networks than those founded by locally-educated leaders.
Event venue & nearby stays
154 Bay State Rd (Elits room, 2nd flr), 154 Bay State Road, Boston, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.