Menchik Wins ISA Religion and IR Book Award
Jeremy Menchik, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Fredrick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently awarded the Religion and International Relations Book Award by the International Studies Association (ISA) for his book Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance Without Liberalism.
“Receiving the Religion and International Relations Book Award is a great honor,” Menchik said. “It is humbling and gratifying to have something that I worked so hard on for so many years recognized by esteemed scholars.”
Menchik said the award is especially gratifying given the recent increases in Islamophobia and hate crimes targeting Muslims in America.
“While my book is more empirical than normative, it addresses a pressing humanitarian concern by explaining how Islamic organizations think about tolerance,” Menchik said. “The book humanizes Islamic organizations at a time when xenophobia plagues the public sphere and informs militarized policies around the globe.”
In Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance Without Liberalism, Menchik examines how Indonesia’s Islamic organizations envision the accommodation of religious difference in the country. While Indonesia’s Islamic organizations sustain the country’s thriving civil society, democracy, and reputation for tolerance amid diversity, scholars poorly understand how these organizations envision the accommodation of religious difference. Menchik examines what tolerance means to the world’s largest Islamic organizations and what the implications of democracy are in Indonesia and the broader Muslim world.
Jeremy Menchik’s research interests include comparative politics, religion and politics, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. His research has received the Mildred Potter Hovland Journal Article Prize, the Best Qualitative or Multi-Method Submission to the American Political Science Review, the Graduate Student Paper Award from the Indonesia and East Timor Studies Committee of the Association of Asian Studies, and his dissertation was given Honorable Mention for the Aaron Wildavsky Award. At Boston University he is a member of the graduate faculty of political science and coordinates the MA program in IR and Religion.
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