A small advisory group has been set up to provide substantive inputs on the research design and the research reports.
The members of the advisory team are:
- Asef Bayat, International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, Leiden, the Netherlands
Asef Bayat is the Academic Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), Leiden, the Netherlands, and the ISIM Chair at Leiden University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Kent and has taught sociology and Middle East studies at the American University in Cairo. His academic interests range from Political Sociology, Social Movements, to Urban Space and Politics, International Development, Contemporary Middle East, and Islam and the Modern World. He has conducted ethnographic research in the areas of popular mobilization in the Iranian Revolution; labor movements; politics of the urban poor; development NGOs; everyday cosmopolitanism; comparative Islamisms; and Muslim youth cultural politics, primarily in Iran and Egypt. Besides numerous articles, he recently authored a book on “Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn” (Stanford University Press, 2007).
- Franziska Brantner, European Studies Centre, Oxford University, UK
Franziska Brantner lives at present in Paris and writes her PhD thesis on the role of the EU in UN reform. She graduated in 2004 with a double diploma from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and of the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Paris (Sciences Po). She has worked for the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Israel on minority rights promoting projects, as well as with young women in Central and Eastern Europe, including the Balkans, and Central Asia in a project of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). She continued to work with UNIFEM, assisting the launch of the International Women’s Commission for a just and sustainable Israeli-Palestinian peace in Istanbul in 2005. She also advised the Delegation of the European Commission to the UN and has participated in the UN Commission on the Status of Women since 2000.
- Deniz Kandiyoti, Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK
Deniz Kandiyoti is Reader in Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK. She holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has taught and researched in universities in Turkey, the USA and Britain. Her research interests include comparative perspectives on gender, household formation and development, and Islam and state policies in the Middle East. Her work on gender and Islam, especially in post-colonial and rural development areas, has been influential throughout the entire field. She has pioneered new research into understanding the implications of Islam and state policy on women, and as a result has brought more attention to the field. More recently she has worked in the Central Asian republics of the former USSR on post-Soviet transitions with special reference to land rights and agrarian reform. Among her recent publications are the articles “Between the Hammer and the Anvil: Post Conflict Reconstruction, Islam and Women’s Rights” (Third World Quarterly, 28/3, 2007) and “Old Dilemmas or New Challenges? The Politics of Gender and Reconstruction in Afghanistan” (Development and Change, 38/2, 2007).
