Hani Abdel-Warith

Research

My research examines political development, state capacity, and identity formation in postcolonial contexts, with regional emphasis on the Middle East and North Africa. I investigate how autocratic states strategically allocate public goods—particularly education—to manage opposition and engineer political cleavages that persist across generations.

Dissertation

Civic Licensing: Education, Autocracy, and Political Identity in Postcolonial States

Doctoral dissertation

This dissertation tests the proposition that postcolonial governments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and in Africa and Asia more broadly unevenly supplied secondary schooling to facilitate autocratic governance. Such regimes concentrated human capital, upward mobility, and social status in pro-regime and neutral areas. Conversely, autocracies withheld schools from historically oppositional areas, relatively undersupplying districts with histories of political rebellion against the incumbent regime.

I introduce and empirically investigate the process of 'civic licensing', a macro-level theory connecting anti-regime threats at independence to the allocation of secondary schools under autocracy and downstream political cleavages thereafter. Civic licenses are state-distributed credentials that serve as a prerequisite for access to a meritocratic stratum with associated club benefits and status identity. In postcolonial states, I posit that secondary education functioned as a civic license, as government policy guaranteed employment to college graduates. The politicized provision of secondary education under postcolonial autocracy leaves behind spatially divergent status differentials, political identities, and a political cleavage structure across provisioned and punished zones.

I reveal a robust negative association between anti-regime threat at independence and educational provision thereafter. Testing individual-level implications, I show that educational provision patterns at independence drive variation in attitudes, electoral behavior, and protest participation in the postcolonial Maghreb. The study highlights scarce education supplied at independence as an understudied driver of political identity and status formation in postcolonial states.

Empirical Scope

  • 6,047 geolocated schools in Tunisia (1880–2024)
  • 1,143 nationalist contentious events in Tunisia (1950–1956)
  • 1,165 nationalist contentious events in Morocco (1950–1956)
  • Nationally representative survey data from Tunisia (N = 1,004)
  • Comparative evidence from Senegal, Cameroon, and other MENA regimes
Theoretical framework
Theoretical framework: Civic licensing mechanism and downstream implications
Anti-regime rebellion zones
Anti-regime rebellion zones in Tunisia, 1950–1956
Secondary school distribution
Tunisia secondary school distribution by region
Effects on subjective social status
Effects of education and underprovision on subjective social status

Publications

Secularization in the Minaret's Shadow: Group Identity and Religious Identity in the Contemporary MENA Region abstract
Hüseyin E. Ceyhun and Hani Abdel-Warith • Mediterranean Politics • 2025 doi
We study the relationship between political polarization along the Islamist-Secularist cleavage and religiosity in the contemporary MENA region. We find that political polarization decreases religiosity and that this relationship is robust to various measures of polarization and estimation models. These effects are driven by partisanship: while Secularists have become more distanced from religion, their Islamist counterparts have become more religious. Probing alternate mechanisms, we find that polarizing consequences are not driven by age effects, parental pressures, or social media use. We argue that our results reflect social identity dynamics and specifically the increased salience and polarization of 'Secularist' and 'Islamist' identities. This study shows how political polarization can drive social change in developing societies, initiating a secularization process driven by identity conflict rather than modernization.

Working Papers

Rebellion and Educational Supply after Colonial Rule: Secondary Education and Civic Licensing in Postcolonial Tunisia abstract
How do political cleavages form in postcolonial autocracies? I argue that after independence, nondemocratic governments in Africa and Asia leveraged scarce secondary school provision as a tool facilitating regime survival and social control. In these states, leaders widely established secondary education as a prerequisite for political participation; selectively supplied schooling became the gateway to access employment within the government administration, to a politically manufactured meritocracy, and to upward mobility more generally. Governments formed territorialized threat perceptions, modally in places with a history of opposition mobilization, and withheld schools from these zones. I call this macro-level strategy of uneven reward and punishment, 'civic licensing'. Using rich evidence from Tunisia, I empirically substantiate this argument with spatially disaggregated datasets of nationalist contentious events (N=1,143, 1950-1956) and school construction records since 1880. I show that Youssefist regions became enduring sites of political entrepreneurship and mobilization, explaining patterns of cleavage-formation and mass mobilization in the postcolonial era.
Anatomy of Religious Infrastructure in Authoritarian Regimes abstract
Gordon Arsenoff, Amaney Jamal, Elizabeth Nugent, Hüseyin E. Ceyhun, and Hani Abdel-Warith
A robust literature in political science suggests that places of worship can serve as sites of opposition mobilization in authoritarian states. At the same time, regimes have the repressive advantage over opposition, and can respond to this potential challenge by regulating places of worship. We build on the implications of this important, largely case-based scholarship and conduct systematic empirical tests in pursuit of evidence of regime control of places of worship in authoritarian regimes. Specifically, we examine the geographic location of mosques and how these placements might serve regime interests. We first examine the correlates over 250,000 mosque geolocations from 13 Middle Eastern countries and demonstrate that "supply and demand" (i.e., population-based) explanations do not account for the placement of mosques. We then analyze fine-grained records of mosque construction under the incumbent regimes in Turkey and Egypt. The regimes have different relationships to religion; the Turkish regime legitimizes itself through an affiliation with religion, while Egypt's more secular regime is severely threatened by its Islamist opposition. We find that Turkey's regime builds new mosques to bolster its electoral advantages by rewarding stronghold areas, suggesting it seeks to win additional support with this construction, while the Egyptian regime builds new mosques in historically Islamist regions in order to crowd out its oppositional rivals. Our results suggest that the spatial geography of religious infrastructure is a meaningful indicator of regime strategies of political control and reveals this logic in otherwise hard-to-access regimes.

Selected Works in Preparation