Research

Research Agenda

I am a comparative politics scholar whose research lies at the intersection of religion and politics, secular authoritarianism, informal institutions, and identity, with a regional focus on Eastern Europe and Central Asia. My work is driven by puzzles that emerge from political phenomena I observe in the field and seeks to explain how religious and political institutions interact to shape political behavior and authoritarian governance. Drawing on work from comparative politics, political sociology, history, and religious studies, I take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding these dynamics.

I study how religious institutions shape political behavior, the downstream consequences of reforms to religious institutions, and the role of historical legacies in structuring contemporary religious and political life.

This often means that my questions seek to understand the relationship between religious institutions, authoritarian rule and legacies, and regime maintenance. My fieldwork in Kazakhstan and Ukraine lets me examine these questions up close, in societies navigating competing pressures of secularism, tradition, and state management.

Book Project: From Co-optation to Traditionalist Campaigns: Authoritarian Responses to Non-state Religious Actors

Under what conditions do secular authoritarian regimes platform religious actors? This paper 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. Drawing on interviews and an original dataset of more than 5,000 transcribed religious television broadcasts, I show how secular authoritarian regimes shape societal beliefs through religious intermediaries. I present evidence of 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

Fieldwork in Shymkent, Kazakhstan, August 2022

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.

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.

Under Review

Tekturmas Mausoleum in Taraz, Kazakhstan, Summer 2025

Auliye Bastau Sacred Spring in Taraz, Kazakhstan, Summer 2025

“Does Secular Authoritarian Intervention in Religious Institutions Shape Gender Attitudes and Behavior?” with Khasan Redjaboev

Does secular authoritarian intervention in religious institutions shape gender attitudes and behavior? Existing scholarship assumes that formal, state-controlled religious institutions reify traditional doctrine and marginalize women. We challenge this assumption by comparing formal mosques and madrasas with informal public shrines to examine whether proximity and exposure to these sites shapes gender-inclusive attitudes and behavior. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, all secular authoritarian states, are well-suited to this analysis, as their shared sociopolitical conditions allow us to exploit variation in institutional design. Drawing on an original geolocated dataset of religious institutions (N = 6,704), 97 semi-structured interviews, and LiTS 2016 survey data, we find that proximity to formal religious institutions can breed gender-inclusive outcomes. Our interviews illustrate that mosques can actively promote gender-inclusive attitudes through women's educational programming, whereas shrines do so less consistently. These findings suggest that formal religious institutions warrant renewed attention as sites of women's civic engagement and inclusion.

In Progress

Site visit to the 'Afghan Church' in Kyiv, Ukraine, Summer 2025

“Religious Affiliation and National Identity: Evidence from Ukrainian Churches Under Russian Aggression” (write-up stage)

Under what conditions do churches choose to switch or not switch religious affiliation? 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 political-identity-motivated-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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