Research

Visit to Khoja Ahmed Yasawi Mausoleum in Turkestan, Kazakhstan, May 2025

Recruitment flyers from fieldwork in Shymkent, Kazakhstan, August 2022

Research Interests

My research sits at the intersection of religion, informal institutions, and identity in authoritarian and post-Communist contexts. I study how religious life shapes political behavior, from how religious beliefs filter into public opinion, to how regular participation in religious institutions transforms political attitudes over time. My fieldwork has taken me to Kazakhstan and Ukraine, where I examine these dynamics up close in societies navigating competing pressures of secularism, tradition, and state management.

I engage in quantitative and qualitative methodologies. I also have experience working with and building large observational datasets in R, employing qualitative and quantitative text analysis, and survey methods.

Dissertation Project

Why do secular authoritarian regimes platform religious actors? My dissertation examines how secular authoritarian states, navigate the tension between formal secularism and the rising influence of entrepreneurial religious actors in the public sphere. I argue that regimes do so in the service of regime maintenance to support the side of cultural engineering they cannot achieve on their own. At the meso-level, the state co-opts religious traditionalist influencers, figures with massive public reach on YouTube, podcasts, and state media, who can produce pro-regime discourse that simultaneously secures the regime’s social legitimacy as protector of religious traditions, culture, and family values without sacrificing its secular commitments. Exploiting variation in the degree actors are co-opted and using field interviews from Kazakhstan, I first establish what co-optation looks like on the ground, tracing how specific religious traditionalists shift their rhetoric before and after entering state-aligned platforms. I present text analysis evidence of a YouTube video corpus ranging from 2014-2026, showing how co-opted religious traditionalist’ rhetoric converges over time with regime-backed messaging. Cases center on figures such as Nurlan Imam and Mukhamedzhan Tazabek, whose YouTube content can be compared to that of the state-affiliated Muslim regulatory body (the Muftiyat), exploiting channel-level and individual-level variation to identify co-optation in action.

Publications

1. Olijar, Marika, and Junda Li. 2023. “Persuasion or Polarization? LGBTQ+ Attitudes among Young Social Media Users in Kazakhstan.” Central Asian Survey, DOI: 10.1080/02634937.2023.2187759.

Abstract: Does social media exposure contribute to progressive or polarized views among youth? With a large and young population online, Kazakhstan offers a polarized authoritarian context in which to study the effects of social media. We use a mixed-method approach that contrasts wider statistical trends from an online survey and experiment with Kazakhstani youth aged 18–30 (N = 1027) and empirical data from 23 exploratory semi-structured interviews with mainly urban Kazakhstani youth conducted in the southern regions of the country in August 2022. The findings from both analyses show that the frequent use of social media positively influences Kazakhstani youth attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community. We also causally identify that pro-LGBTQ+ social media posts in general promote positive LGBTQ+ attitudes but post wording may matter less. The findings from statistical and non-statistical analyses show the frequent use of social media positively influences Kazakhstani youth attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community.

The authors have committed to self-archiving to ensure access to Central Asian and LGBTQ+ people outside academia. Please find the linked paper here.

In Progress

1. “Does Post-Communist Religious Institution Type Affect Gender Attitudes?” with Khasan Redjaboev (write-up stage)

Do authoritarian secularization policies affect attitudes and behaviors concerning women? Existing scholarship largely ignores the role of religious institutional design, which we advance as an explanation. Post-communist Central Asia provides a useful setting, where state repression and regulation of Islam produced a dual system of state-sanctioned formal and less regulated informal institutions. Using an original dataset of religious institutions (N = 6,704), 97 interviews, and panel survey data from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, we find limited support for the expectation that informal institutions foster more gender-inclusive attitudes and behaviors; their effects are largely null. Proximity to formal religious institutions is associated with null to positive effects, including increased women’s participation and mother's education. We conclude that institutional inclusivity rather than institutional type explain these results: post-communism's religious revivals may be transforming formal institutions into sites of community formation and women’s engagement.

2. “Religious Affiliation and National Identity: Evidence from Ukrainian Churches Under Russian Aggression” (qualitative data collection stage; quantitative analysis stage)

Under what conditions do churches choose to switch or not switch from the UOC-MP to the OCU? We examine this question in Ukraine, where starting in 2018 each of the country's Orthodox churches were given the option to publicly affiliate with either the Moscow Patriarchate or the newly-created Orthodox Church of Ukraine. We model this church-by-church decision as a product of local political attitudes, state capacity, socioeconomic context, religious competition, and exposure to war violence. A number of findings stand out, including that the probability of "defending the nation''–switching to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine–is highest among churches that are physically smaller, located in less developed areas, are closer to nationalist churches that existed prior to 2018, and are in areas with greater political competition. Spatial models also show that being located near other Orthodox churches that switch strongly influence a church’s own decision to switch. Additional qualitative information provides further context to illustrate these findings, and suggests a new focus on the role of priests.

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