Dr Teije Hidde Donker: “To explore the world is to talk to people.”

Dr. Teije Hidde Donker recently finished a three year lecturer position at the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. His work centers around the intersections of political sociology, sociology and Middle East area studies. In the course of his academic career, he has done extensive fieldwork in Syria, Tunisia, Turkey and Jordan. He has contributed to the book Social Movements and Civil Wars: When protests for democratization fail(Routledge, 2017) and most recently published the article Sacred as Secular: State Control and Independence of Mosques in Post-revolutionary Tunisia (2019) investigating how religion and state relate to public life in Tunisia.

In the fourth instalment of our series of interviews with academics we admire, Dr. Teije Hidde Donker talks to sub-editor Sandra Guldborg about his fieldwork in the Middle East, his work on social movements, and how the choice to study Arabic led him on the path into academia.

To begin with, could you speak to your path into academia and what drew you to the field of sociology?

As a political sociologist, I ended up doing research on social mobilization, social movements and religion in the Arab world, specifically in Syria and Tunisia. That is where I ended up. The path there, is really a path of chance encounters and chance turns and twists. I actually started out wanting to become a doctor, a medical doctor—the real kind of doctor, not the fake one—and I wanted to work for Médecins Sans Frontières. Unfortunately, I did not get the grades for medical school in the Netherlands. Then I had to find something different. I had a gap year before going to university, and I decided to travel with one of those tourist volunteer organizations, where you volunteer and then teach children in a school. I went to Ghana. Atthat point I did not realize that I was taking away a job of a Ghanaian. I am now far more critical of these kinds of initiatives than I was back then. But it gave me the idea to go into the field of development studies, which I ended up pursuing as an undergraduate. Already very quickly in the first few months, I decided to do conflict studies as a minor and I realized that actually in development studies, there is very little work to be done. You study why global socio-economic inequalities exist, but if you want to do something about it, you have to have additional, particular knowledge. I do not want to be too critical towards development studies, but at least the way it was taught in Nijmegen in the Netherlands where I was studying it, I did realize I needed something additional if I wanted to be useful and to have a chance in the job market. Of course, development studies is international, so a language for instance might help. I was privileged to have a lot of time, so I thought about a language in high demand but very few people know—a language that is very hard to learn. On the face of it, the choice was between two languages: Chinese or Arabic. Because I did conflict studies, I thought that Arabic and the Middle East was much more logical. When you think about it, China also had lots of conflicts, but that was just the way I was thinking back then. 

Halfway through the first year of my bachelor, I started to study Arabic in Nijmegen. It was six contact hours a week, plus all the additional learning. There were two terms per year, so it was a full year of learning Arabic. It was really quite a lot—and then somewhere halfway through the second year, I realized that you don’t learn Arabic in the Netherlands. You have to learn Arabic in the region. So, I decided I had to go there. This was 2004. I was looking through the different countries that were available. Egypt is a country that many people go to, but their dialect is actually quite different. There are three countries in the Middle East where the dialect that people speak is very close to the formal Arabic language: Yemen, Palestine and Syria. Syria was quite cheap, and it sounded nice, so I chose to go there. After the second year of my bachelor, I stopped my studies for a year, borrowed money from the Dutch state, and used this (along with a little bit I had earned through work) to fund a year of study in Syria. Early on, I realized that the whole year of learning Arabic in Holland was about one month of learning Arabic in Syria. It was a fantastic time. I was living with a Syrian family and Syrians are just very down to earth. I immediately had a nicer time there than I ever had in Ghana. Ghana was great and Ghanaians are great people, but I just felt much more at home in Syria. At the same time, it was also very different. First of all, I was living with a family in a lower socio-economic neighborhood. The family with which I was living was a different family from my own family, but it also had a different socio-economic status. It was just very interesting to become part of this family, to be pushed out of your normal life—not just by living in Syria, but by living in a different kind of environment. 

“Everybody knows about the Muslim Brotherhood, but nobody talks about it. How does the movement still have so much power, without being active? How do these sheikhs, who are very prominent, say they aren’t political actors, when of course they are very political? How do all these games actually work? That is just very interesting. ”

Did living in Syria contribute to your interest in religion? 

Living in Syria, religion is just much more apparent. In the sense that you had Sufi sheikhs that are very close to the president. Everybody knows them. It doesn’t matter if someone is religious or not. Everybody realized that those people have power. In contrast, if you would ask me to name any formal religious representative in Holland, I would be able to come up with anything. So that’s just very interesting. And of course, at this time, Syria was a completely authoritarian country. But those people, you really saw that they have a kind of power. There is a kind of dance going on between those religious actors and political power. They really have a socio-economic position. When I was observing this, and when you live this, and when you talk with people about this, you just want to know more about it. The family I was living with was a Christian family, being a religious minority was always there as a topic of conversation. That was the first moment I started thinking, “maybe I want to do a little bit more about this.” But this was my first year and I was still just a second-year bachelor. I came back, finished my bachelor, and while I finished my bachelor, I was picked up by a policy institute called Clingendael. It is like the Chatham House of the Netherlands. This was because I had just been in Syria, and there was a person who worked there, who was teaching me and he told me about an internship, and then I started working there. This of course is the more ‘policy’ direction, and so I got pushed into that direction. I realized that my Arabic was still not good enough to actually have a proper conversation after a year of living in Syria. So, I went back a second time to Syria. 

What was Syria like your second time around?

Everything got a lot more serious. I knew, of course, what Syria was like, but I was living on my own this time. In a normal neighborhood, I just rented an apartment and just went about my life. I didn’t interact so much with foreign students as I had previously. I really just started sitting down with people on benches and elsewhere, to talk about these kinds of issues. Then the Muslim Brotherhood as a topic in Syria started to come up when you talk about political views and religion. And at that time, the name of the Muslim Brotherhood was like ‘Voldemort’ in Harry Potter—the person who cannot be named. There was such fear. Then you get into the topic of how these religious people, these Sufi sheikhs, really have power. But at the same time, you have this party that was very active in the 1980’s and was then repressed, but still, everybody knows it. Everybody knows about the Muslim Brotherhood, but nobody talks about it. How does the movement still have so much power, without being active? How do these sheikhs, who are very prominent, say they aren’t political actors, when of course they are very political? How do all these games actually work? That is just very interesting. 

During that year, I started to think that I wanted to dive into this. And the only way to do that, to have a reason to talk to people in an open way, is to start an academic project. From that moment on, I started thinking about how general conceptual and analytical frameworks could be useful in thinking about this. I realized that the standard discussions on political parties and how they relate to political representation and elections does not apply to an authoritarian system. They have elections, but these elections have a very different logic. Furthermore, these games between Sufi sheikhs and the regime and this party that has been repressed is actually still present. These are all issues that do not have to do with formal institutions but have to do with emotions—with informal relations, with social mobilization. At that moment it became clear that studies on social movements, protests—not just overtly but also underground—that those kinds of studies might fit much better. I then started going into particular academic debates and started to apply them. 

I first started to play with this when I did a masters at the University of Amsterdam, and that is when I realized I still did not know much. There was still so much that I didn’t understand; I only knew bits and pieces. Funnily enough, I then got a postdoc position at the University of Amsterdam—a position for normally reserved for PhD’s, but because I had my  Syriaexperience they hired my anyway. And from there I was allowed to apply for PhD positions. Then I got an offer from the European University Institute in Florence and from there on it went. It’s just about choices you make: you learn a language, you live there and start to see that something is weird and there is something you don’t understand, and then you dive in deeper and deeper.

Where did you start with your PhD? 

I started out with studying the interaction between Sufi sheikhs and the authoritarian regime. I wrote a paper on this, ‘Moth or Flame’ (Donker, 2009). This was like a game; they needed to interact, but at the same time, they could be repressed. I wanted to make a comparison between Syria and Algeria, because Algeria is a very fragmented regime, so I went there during the first year of my PhD and set up the whole project, but the tricky thing with Algeria is that you really need a visa. I was in the Netherlands in December 2010, applying for a visa, and I still remember being at my brother’s place, looking at the TV and thinking: ‘What is happening in Tunisia?’. There was this story about protests in small towns in the periphery, getting closer and closer to the Tunisian capital, and then suddenly it was in the capital. Before I could get my visa to Algeria, Ben Ali was gone.      

While this was happening, I called my supervisor Donatella Della Porta and asked what she thought about me going to Tunisia. She said ‘Sure, do it!’. Two weeks after the revolution, I landed in Tunisia and completely changed my topic. Then,I was living in a revolutionary situation, as opposed to living in an authoritarian situation before. Suddenly, after the fall of the previous authoritarian leader Ben Ali, they had freedom. Nobody knew what was going on. No one knew who had power. Even the people in power didn’t know who had power. It was complete, utter chaos. Also, there, religion and religious people came back. What does it mean to be Tunisian? Is there a relation to religion? What’s the position of those parties, an Islamist party, in politics? Is the state anti-religion? Or do they just defend the secular character of Tunisian society? Those are two very different answers to what the state is. So again, it’s a completely different social situation, but again, religion started to matter. Something just happened. No one saw the Arab Spring coming. I didn’t get a visa for Algeria, so I ended up in Tunisia, and with that my whole PhD project and my research goes into political and social change, and what you see happening with religion in those kinds of situations—again, chance.

Once you started exploring the field of sociology, what were your main intellectual influences?

I really initially drew on the more American school of social movement studies, so Charles Tilly and Doug McAdam. I think many students of social movement studies will recognize these debates of political opportunity structures, social networks, framing. They were the basic lines of my investigation far into the PhD.  When I set out, I did not make a choice to follow a ‘Weberian approach’. I did not have that awareness of the structure of sociology and political science. Partially, this might have to do with where I was taught—in the Netherlands—but mostly, I think it has to do with that I studied development studies. It was very anthropological. Already very early on, even in my bachelor’s, there was a focus on gender and those kinds of debates. But because I went to Syria, gender really matters. The moment you begin to talk about gender in Syria, it is immediately linked to the idea of a foreigner coming from outside talking to us about gender – there is a real issue of autonomy. For a long time, I shied away from those kinds of debates, so I ended up drawing on social movement studies, and then drawing on what American social movement studies was actually influenced by: institutional politics, framing from Goffman, network analysis a little bit—that whole mixture.

“The beauty of fieldwork is being a stranger to a field in which you are not a part of the social and political structures. ”

You mention this problem of positionality in relation to studying gender. Having done extensive fieldwork in Syria, Tunisia, Turkey and Jordan, what reflections have you done in relation to your fieldwork, and how might your positionality as a European scholar studying the Middle East play any part in that?

Ah, I saw that question coming! Two things. First of all, in relation to what we just talked about, doing fieldwork is important more generally. It has to do with chance, serendipity. It gives the context of chance encounters, meeting people and being in situations that you are usually not in. In my experience, those are the kind of contexts in which you get new insights. In that sense, it is just good to mix people up, not to stay in your own context, but to go back and forth. That perhaps sounds a little too beautiful. Of course, by going into the back and forth, there is a real inequality. Because you can just go there. I still look a little bit young and innocent, but ten years ago, I looked a lot more young and innocent – and you just get away with so much. I did not realize that while I was there. I have begun to realize this much more, in large parts also due to the debates going on right now. Especially living in the UK, where those debates are going on much more explicitly. The way that I travelled on my own, speaking with people—being male, being white, gives you a quite safe position to do that—but also being young and looking innocent gives you a lot of freedom. It just matters that I come from that background. 

There is a small caveat: gender really matters in the Arab world. It is too easy to say that as a male, you are in an advantaged position. The tricky thing is that when you are a man in the Arab world, you have access to formal arenas and formal interactions. When you are female, a Western female, you also have access to informal, family contexts. I would never be invited to any informal household setting. And it is very physical. Many Arab houses have a room for formal guests—this is where I would be. When you are female, you will also be invited to all the other rooms in the house. In that sense there is a wider range to be part of. Female scholars also have access to the formal side of things—you have access to both. As a male, you only have access to the one. That being said, there are all kinds of other issues that still apply. There is just an insane amount of misogyny going on and it is a very tricky situation to navigate as a woman. When you are a man, it is much more simple. You find yourself in a very different context, and you have a very particular positionality, which is very hard to navigate. 

Another issue: the beauty of fieldwork is being a stranger to a field in which you are not a part of the social and political structures. I could talk with a poor student at a university and with a minister in the government. In my personal opinion, fieldwork is very useful to gain access to many different parts of a society. And it works both ways. There is actually a PhD student in sociology from an Afghan background, who does research on the Netherlands. The research he does is just fantastic. He focuses on Afghan minorities but at the same time also talks with the Amsterdam municipality. So then, you see a non-Dutch, foreigner, looking at your own society, and that gives a whole new view of institutional racism. You start to realize how effective it is to have a foreign, outsider view. In that sense, it is very useful to just switch those perspectives. That is what you do with fieldwork. Of course, it takes place in a world that is fundamentally unequal, and there are lots of issues that make this exchange fundamentally unequal, and that is something that we have to keep on discussing and addressing.

Can we be aware of the limits fieldwork comes with, while still contributing that outsider perspective you speak of?

You do not just want foreigners researching your country—and this does happen in the Arab world. It is a huge problem. There is a whole set of foreign researchers researching the Middle East, who therefore have a very powerful voice in shaping the image of that region. That is both dangerous, and it actually threatens the accumulation of knowledge, in all kinds of different ways, politically and morally, but just very practically in creating knowledge. Luckily, nowadays, things are getting a little bit better. Increasingly, engagement with Arab scholars is becoming a core element of research projects. Funding is another fundamental issue, and in the Middle East and North Africa there is just very little funding for social science research. To help out in these issues is just very important. There are just lots of problems with being a white, male, Western researcher creating knowledge there. At the same time, there is also value in going into the field and engaging with these chance encounters, by living with people for a long time and getting a feel for what you’re talking about. That is immensely important and something I want to emphasize. Especially long-term fieldwork, living in a place for a long time, there is no alternative to this. There is no alternative to getting this kind of sense and feel for a particular topic.                

I would like to circle a bit back to your work with social movements. You contributed a chapter on the Syrian uprising of March 2011 to the book ‘Social Movements and Civil Wars: When protests for democratization fail’. The main aim of the book is to theorize the ‘causal mechanism […] behind the transformation of mobilization to civil war’. What ‘causal mechanisms’ did you identify in your case study of Syria?

There are two answers here. The book itself compares a number of cases: Libya, Syria, Yugoslavia. There are certain mechanisms you can find that apply a little bit along those different cases. For example, having a weak civil society and a weak state and how that interaction works out. You see that they work out differently between those different cases. Also, the move from peaceful protest towards violence and how that radicalization of repertoire of contention develops. The emergence of subnational identities, maybe sectarianism or ethnicity, that you see emerge. You see those kinds of mechanisms working in all those different cases, just in different interactions. Syria in that case, is no different. You see first an uprising that is explicitly nationalistic. It is really saying: ‘We are Syrians, and we are mobilizing for accountability against the regime’. From day one, they realized that the sectarian element, the argument that it is not Syrians mobilizing but Sunni Muslims mobilizing, is going to be our main threat. They knew this from day one. Still, they were not able to avoid this kind of trajectory. With the Syrian case, that is a very painful thing to observe. To see those social mechanisms that they themselves are aware of and that they keep on applying. You see a regime who plays up the fragmentation of mobilization, plays the security card instead of rehabilitation, and therefore keeps the ability to repress. Instead of accountability, you want security for your own group. And it is an authoritarian leader that can provide that kind of security—not a political democratic system. From the start, that is a card that was played—often implicitly, but everybody knew. They knew, and still you see that it happens. This was just a very painful case to observe.

How did the ‘causal mechanisms’ in the Syrian case relate to some of the more conventional assumptions that come to mind when thinking about revolutions and uprisings?

Now with revolutions and uprisings there are lots of different approaches. When you look at Tunisia, that is a path where you have an uprising, a political system that changes, and then you have a particular development that ends up with a new political system. I think that the classic approach to revolutions can be nicely applied to this. The Syrian case is a little bit different, because it is an uprising that develops into a civil war, hence it being included in this book. So, it is not as such a ‘revolution’. In Syria, the Assad regime is still there. In that sense as well, it is not a revolution. But you could look at debates on social movements and the extent to which they apply, or civil wars and how they apply to this case. What we did in this book was to apply the more recent mechanistic approach to this case. That approach is very broad, so it does apply, but I do think that in the classic, more U.S. approach to social movements, it is very aimed at an interaction between incumbents and challengers. You have a political system, and you have protestors that are non-formal institutionalized parties who try to influence this political system. That’s the general kind of view of political opportunity structures. 

When you apply this to a case like Syria, it does not apply as such, because actually the whole political structure—where you should be outside or inside—starts to break down. And of course, that doesn’t apply to the Syrian regime as such, so the uprising was always engaging with the Syrian regime. But inside the uprising, inside the revolution, things started fragmenting. And the moment that they started to control pieces of the country, of areas, government structures emerged. There were all kinds of fights between different groups about who would control what. At the same time, you still had protestors who protested against the regime, but also protested against what those new groups were doing to them. Then you actually see that the whole scene of protesting starts to fragment, just as the political system fragments. This kind of dynamic is actually not described as much in classic studies. So, we described this a little bit in that chapter, and we could because we took this mechanistic approach. I think it could have come out a little bit better, however, to criticize the classic approaches was not the aim of the book. Those classic approaches apply to certain circumstances, like political opportunity structures. Yet, they have their limits.

What do you think are the most interesting developments in your field at the moment?

There are a lot of interesting things happening in social movement studies! Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, classic approaches of political opportunity structures have been heavily critiqued for being structuralist and also for not taking emotions and feelings into consideration. In large part, this was because the classic approaches in U.S. political sociology were really a reaction to crowd studies, they were a reaction to the kind of studies that say that protests are the result of people becoming irrational and doing crazy things. They reacted to this by focusing on political institutions, by strategic framing, by social networks, by research mobilization, which is all very rational. These are all ways of showing that protestors are not irrational and that instead, there are all kinds of rational processes going on. In this push, in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, feelings were forgotten a little bit. So, in the 1990’s and 2000’s, there were all kinds of attempts to articulate new approaches and it was quite chaotic. This is a little bit the situation we are at now. The interesting thing is the attempts that are being made to bridge the more emotional, individual storytelling with protests and social movements taking place in a particular structural context. 

So, you try to bridge the individual and the cognitive with the more political structures of context. How do you do that? That is a very tricky thing. The beauty is that there have been many sociologists who struggled with these kinds of issues for a very long time. Social movement studies draws from all kinds of different directions: political science and sociology. For instance, you see a scholar like Bourdieu with his fields that actually emerge at the intersection of individual cognition and structural inequalities that a field has. At that intersection, the relationships between people that emerge are patterned, and therefore you see a particular field. That is an approach that people have been drawing on. McAdam and Fligstein’s ‘strategic action fields’ created a new concept, but you also have symbolic interactionism—trying to see how out of individual interactions in particular contentious situations, you actually see a particular arena emerge of interaction, and that arena has particular rules that people then have to abide by. Then, you see a particular context actually emerge from the individual interactions. There is still this dynamic and mechanistic approach that is a bit older but is also an attempt to take on the more cognitive, social constructivist insights into the more classic discussions of political institutions. These approaches are all from the last ten to fifteen years. You see that people start to engage with this much more and struggle with these kinds of questions. There is not really a clear consensus, and that is a good thing. Not having a clear framework, is often quite confusing, and this is why political opportunity structures remain very popular. It is such a clear conceptual structure that you can apply to so many cases, which is why people      keep on using it. At the same time, having a field that is struggling with a particular issue when there is no consensus on how to really do this gives a lot of freedom, a context for chance encounters, and the chance for new kinds of insights to emerge. So, this is a really interesting time.

Lastly, what advice would you give to young students interested in a career in academia?

The main advice is to somehow go out there, wherever ‘there’ is, and create a context in which you have chance encounters, where serendipity can actually somehow do its job. Do not stay in the place where you are all the time. That can be anything; it does not have to be going to another country. It can be living in a town where people like you—whatever that may mean—will not be. Just push to meet other people and explore the world. Realize that exploring the world does not happen by travelling, but by talking to people. The world is what people see it to be. To explore the world is to talk to people who see the world differently than you–then you suddenly see a very different world. Talk to people who are very right-wing, not in a discussion, but just hang out, hear their stories, see how they see the world. Then I am sure there will be issues that are just completely, utterly baffling. The same if you are very religious, seek out very secular people—or the other way around. Go out of your bubble. I think that is crucial to sociology and political science, to keep on pushing this. Keep those interactions going.

‘To explore the world is to talk to people’, what a lovely thought!

And you don’t have to go to Syria to do that! But it does help, because then you meet a lot of people who are very different from you. It is far easier to find people who just have a very different view of life. But you can also do this in your own country. 

This conversation has been edited for clarity.