Yuksel Sezgin Home Anasayfa Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

BOOKS AND EDITED VOLUMES

Human Rights under State-Enforced Religious Family Laws in Israel, Egypt and India

2013, Cambridge University Press, ISBN-13: 9781107041400

About one-third of the world’s population currently lives under pluri-legal systems where governments hold individuals subject to the purview of ethno-religious rather than national norms in respect to family law. How does the state-enforcement of these religious family laws impact fundamental rights and liberties? What resistance strategies do people employ in order to overcome the disabilities and limitations these religious laws impose upon their rights? Based on archival research, court observations and interviews with individuals from three countries, Yüksel Sezgin shows that governments have often intervened in order to impress a particular image of subjectivity upon a society, while people have constantly challenged the interpretive monopoly of courts and state-sanctioned religious institutions, renegotiated their rights and duties under the law, and changed the system from within. He also identifies key lessons and best practices for the integration of universal human rights principles into religious legal systems. Read more...

Human Rights and Legal Pluralism

2011, LIT Verlag, ISBN-13: 978-3643999054

Human Rights and Legal Pluralism opens with an article on how to integrate human rights into customary and religious legal systems. It then offers a special study of the issue in a "tribal" women's forum in South Rajastan, India; in customary justice in post-conflict Sierra Leone; in indigenous justice systems in Latin America; and in deep legal pluralism in South Africa. (Series: The Journal of Legal Pluralism, Vol. 60, 2010) Read more...

 

SELECT ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS

Nation-Building and Regulation of Pluri-legal Jurisdictions: The Case of the Israeli Millet System

In The Everyday Life of the State: A State-in-Society Approach, Adam J. White (Ed.), Seattle: University of Washington Press (2013), pp. 91-105

Yüksel Sezgin explores the agency of those who fail to identify with the dominant image of the Israeli state. Sezgin then analyzes the Israeli state’s controversial attempts to use the millet system, an archaic strand of personal status law inherited from the Ottoman Empire, to shape and discipline sections of the diverse Israeli population in the image of homogenous and loyal Israeli-Jewish citizenry. Far from translating this image into a reality, however, Sezgin illustrates how the practices of this nation-building project have actually divided the very population they have been attempting to unite, in the process creating resistance rather than loyalty. Read more...

Regulation of “Religion” and the “Religious”: The Politics of Judicialization and Bureaucratization in India and Indonesia (Co-authored with Mirjam Künkler)

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2014, Vol. 56, No:2, pp.448-478

The article compares the strategies through which Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Indonesia have regulated religion and addressed questions of what constitutes “the religious” in the post-independence period. We show that the dominant approach pursued by the Indian state has been one of judicialization, i.e. the delegation of religious questions to the high courts, while in Indonesia it has predominantly been one of bureaucratization, i.e. the regulation of religious affairs through the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Contrary to the expectation that judicialization devitalizes normative conflicts while bureaucratization, more frequently associated with authoritarian politics, just “locks” these conflicts “in,” we show that these expectations have not materialized; indeed, at times, the effects have been reverse. Engaging the literatures on judicialization and on bureaucratization, we argue that what determines the consequences of the policy toward religion is less the choice of the implementing institution (i.e. the judiciary or bureaucracy) than the mode of delegation (vertical vs. horizontal) which shapes the relationship between the policy-maker and the institution implementing it. Bureaucrats, judges and elected politicians in multicultural societies around the world encounter questions of religious nature very similar to those that authorities in India and Indonesia tackle. How they respond to questions of religion and address the challenge of religious heterogeneity has a profound impact on prospects of nation-building and democratization. It is therefore imperative that the consequences of the policy towards religion and even more so the consequences of political delegation be studied more systematically. This includes how outcomes are shaped by the relationship between policy-making and -implementing authority – a relationship that this article shows may be harder to steer for democratic governments than autocratic ones. Read more...

The Promise and Pitfalls of Women Challenging Muslim Family Laws in India and Israel

In Sexuality in Muslim Contexts: Restrictions and Resistance, Anissa Helie & Homa Hoodfar (Eds.), London: Zed Books (2012), pp.98-123

Across nations one of the most common ways that women’s sexuality and personal autonomy is controlled is through family law, particularly marriage, and divorce. In essence, many such laws are in place to govern autonomous and individual expressions of sexuality, most often through the use of moral arguments located within ethno-religious traditions. Yet matters of family law are often analyzed in terms of state- or nation-building and religious practices. Indeed as Carol Pateman (1988) has shown, family law remains one of the least democratic legal and social institutions, despite women’s struggles, with limited success, for family law reform. Resistance to democratizing family law is often most pronounced by elements within ethno-religious communities which hold a minority position vis-à-vis the state, and are thus excluded from the state political power structure. This has meant that women within such communities have to develop nuanced strategies to extend their sexual and personal autonomy without alienating their community. A comparison of the cases of India and Israel -- where the Muslim minorities’ relationships with the state are extremely politicized -- provides insight into the ways in which women are contesting the governance and control of their sexuality through the re-shaping of marriage and divorce laws. Read more...

Triangulating Reform in Family Law: State, Religion and Women's Rights in Comparative Perspective

In Self-Determination and Women's Rights in Muslim Societies, Chitra Raghavan & James Levine (Eds.), Waltham, Mass., Brandeis University Press (2012), pp. 243-272

In this chapter, Sezgin shows that although religion-based personal status laws discriminate against women, women do not just sit silently on the sidelines and acquiesce in violation of their fundamental rights at the hands of male-dominated religious institutions. On the contrary, women’s groups all over the world are spearheading a silent rights revolution that redefines women’s role as rights-bearing individuals in familial and public spaces. In doing so, these groups contest the scriptural monopoly of state-sanctioned religious institutions, reinterpret religious laws, and reinvent religious tradition by vernacularizing international women’s and human rights discourses. Against this background, the first part of the chapter demonstrates the implications of religion-based laws on rights and freedoms of women by looking at the Israeli, Egyptian, and Indian personal status systems. The second part of the chapter traces women-led reform movements that have emerged in the last two decades in these three countries and shows how women have responded to violations of their rights, and what tactics and strategies they have successfully employed to navigate the maze of religious law. Read more...

Women’s Rights in the Triangle of State, Law, and Religion: A Comparison of Egypt and India

Emory International Law Review, Vol. 25, No. 2, 2011, pp.1007-1028

The main premise of this Essay is that personal status laws, whether based on Muslim, Jewish, or Hindu tradition, are men-made (implying that no females were involved in this process), socio-political constructions that have come invariably to discriminate against women and deny them equal rights in familial relations. However, women do not silently acquiesce in violation of their rights and liberties by male-dominated religious norms and institutions. On the contrary, women-led hermeneutic communities all over the world are spearheading a silent but steady revolution that redefines women’s role as rights-bearing and equal individuals in familial and public space. In doing so, women’s groups contest the scriptural monopoly of state-sanctioned religious institutions, reinterpret religious laws, and reinvent the tradition by vernacularizing international human rights and womens’ discourses. Against this background, Part I of this Essay demonstrates the implications of personal status laws on the rights and freedoms of women by looking at the Egyptian and Indian personal status systems. Part II of this Essay traces women-led reform movements emerging in the last two decades in these two countries and demonstrates how Egyptian and Indian women have claimed the rights and freedoms that current systems have denied them by forming reinterpretive hermeneutic communities. Read more...

The Role of Alternative Legalities in Bringing About Socio-Legal Change in Religious Systems

Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 5, No.2, 2010, pp.245-259 [Reprinted in Nelken David (Ed.), Using Legal Culture, London: Wildy, Simmonds & Hill Pub., pp. 344-362]

Do women have equal rights under Islamic, Jewish or Hindu laws? As far as the actual practice is concerned, the answer is not an affirmative one, as most religious traditions have historically discriminated against women particularly in familial relations. Moreover, in most religious traditions human agency is usually prohibited from interfering with ‘divine’ law that is assumed to represent the ‘God’s’ will and commands. Then, how can gender equality or uplifting of women be achieved under religio-legal systems? If ‘sacred’ laws cannot be amended, does it mean that religio-legal systems are constantly stagnated or frozen in time? Are women eternally doomed to suffer under patriarchal and discriminatory religious laws? The answer is simply ‘no’. For instance, Sisters in Islam, a Muslim feminist organization in Malaysia holds the view that it is not Qur’an or Islam that oppresses women but it is the male-centric and repressive legality built around the originally emancipatory message and word of God that came to discriminate against women. In this regard, they argue that what needs to be changed to improve the status of women is not the law or the text itself but the legality built around it. In fact, all over the world women are contesting legality of customary and religious laws and rendering a more egalitarian and emancipatory understanding of the texts and traditions without necessarily contesting their legitimacy, source or originality. Read more...

How to Integrate Universal Human Rights into Customary and Religious Legal Systems?

Journal of Legal Pluralism, Vol. 60, 2010, pp. 5-40

Customary religious legal systems have been utilized in various areas from fighting against crime to such mundane affairs as setting the price of goods and services in the market place or ordering personal and familial relations. Focusing its lenses exclusively on personal status regimes as quintessential example of customary religious legal systems in the contemporary world; the present study will explain why so many states continue to rely upon such polycentric legal structures for regulating familial affairs and differentiate among their citizens on the basis of religion, ethnicity and gender despite the fact that they were originally founded on premises of non-discrimination and equal treatment. Secondly, the study will explain how pluralistic organization of law and justice affect fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals living under polycentric regimes; how they cope with limitations imposed upon their rights by communal/religious institutions; and what tactics and strategies they use to navigate through the maze of personal law. Lastly, after demonstrating what approaches have been successfully used to bring about changes in the context of Israeli, Egyptian, and Indian personal status laws, the paper will also identify key lessons and recommendations for the purpose of helping human rights activists, donors and members of programmatic communities who design intervention mechanisms and tools to incorporate universal human rights standards into customary and religious systems around the world. Read more...

The Israeli Millet System: Examining Legal Pluralism through Lenses of Nation-Building and Human Rights

The Israel Law Review, Vol. 43, No.3, 2010, pp. 631-654

Israel still maintains a highly pluralistic personal status system (millet) that it inherited from the Ottoman Empire. Under this archaic system, religious courts of fourteen ethno-religious communities, staffed with their very own judges who apply religious and customary laws of their own communities, are granted exclusive jurisdiction over matters of marriage and divorce and concurrent jurisdiction with the civil courts in regard to issues of maintenance and succession. Millet-like systems had been historically employed by imperial powers to segregate and categorize their colonial subjects into racial, ethno-religious and tribal groupings, exclude the subaltern groups from the spoils of power, and deny them the terms of equal membership in the political community. In many regards, the retention of this archaic system by such a modern and democratic polity as the Israeli state was quite paradoxical, given that from the very moment of its inception, the Jewish state has pledged itself to guarantee its citizens' freedom of religion and conscience, and to ensure complete equality of its all inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or gender. In this respect, there are two central puzzles guiding the analysis below: One, why Israel, as a highly centralized and democratic polity, has maintained such a fragmented system of law and courts which accentuates religious, ethnic and gender-based inequalities. Two, how such a polycentric application of law and justice affects individuals' fundamental rights and freedoms, and what tactics and strategies people employ to cope with the limitations imposed upon their rights by communal institutions. Read more...

Legal Unification and Nation Building in the Post-Colonial World: A Comparison of Israel and India

The Journal of Comparative Asian Development, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2009, pp. 273-297

How do states consolidate their legal systems? Do all states follow the same trajectory of state-building and legal unification? And, particularly how do post-colonial states respond to legally pluralistic regimes that they inherit at the time of independence? These are some of the questions that this article will attempt to shed light upon by closely analyzing the Israeli and Indian states' responses to polycentric legal systems that they inherited at the time of their independence. Offering an alternative theory of state-building and legal unification, the present study will not only explain how leaders of these two countries responded to the challenges posed by polycentric jurisdictions but also contribute to our understanding of state, nation-building and legal consolidation in the post-colonial world by re-examining some of the theories and approaches that have long come to dominate the literature. Read more...

Theorizing Formal Pluralism: Quantification of Legal Pluralism for Spatio-Temporal Analysis

Journal of Legal Pluralism, Vol. 50, 2004, pp. 101-118

The different types of legal pluralism have been extensively studied by many anthropologists and legal scholars. But what about the intensity or degree of pluralism? Does this always stay the same or does it ever change over time? Legal pluralism is the reflection of complex human interactions in our normative universe. It changes as a society evolves. With these changes in its form and structure, the degree of plurality also changes. As a result, societies constantly become 'more' or 'less' pluralistic as they evolve. In order to capture these spatio-temporal variations in degrees of legal pluralism, this paper aims to introduce a simple technique of quantification which measures the differing degrees of legal pluralism both over time and across localities. The major benefit of quantification will be to enable those students of legal pluralism who wish to undertake more macro-sociological and cross-national analyses to reach some theoretical generalizations and compare different legal systems at a higher level of abstraction. Along the same lines, the paper also offers a number of theoretical, methodological and ontological novelties to better facilitate a diachronic analysis of legal pluralism. Read more...

A Political Account for Legal Confrontation between State and Society

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol.32, 2004, pp.199-235

This paper endeavors to provide a political analysis of legal pluralism from a 'new institutionalist' perspective. In response to question of why states need to recognize and incorporate non-state normative orderings into their legal systems, it is hypothesized that the decision of incorporation is made with 'efficiency' concerns based on rational cost-benefit calculations. In this respect, two sub-types of state legal pluralism are developed: efficient and inefficient recognition. Both sub-types are exemplified by looking at the Muslim Arabs' Shari'a courts and Jewish Rabbinical Courts in Israel, respectively. The paper also aims to assess the implications of legal pluralism upon the state-society relations in general and capacities of modern nation-states in the case of Israel. Lastly, it is also concluded that community-based religious rights systems are naturally antithetical to the ideals of personal liberty in our liberal age. Read more...

Can Israeli Status Quo Model Help the Post-28 February Turkey Solve Its Problems

Turkish Studies, Vol.4, No.3, 2003, pp.47-70

As a result of the February 28, 1997, incident, Islamist parties have been ostracized and excluded from governmental politics. This has caused serious legitimacy, participation and representation crises in the Turkish polity. This study examines whether the Justice and Development Party's (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi-AKP) landslide victory in the Nov. 2002 elections has put an end to the Feb. 28 Process. It also suggests that further liberalization of the Turkish regime will be possible only if the religious and secular parties come together and agree on the rules for future engagement. Thus, with reference to President Inönü's July 12 Declaration and the Israeli status quo model of 1947, this essay attempts to sketch out these rules of engagement. Read more...

The October 1998 Crisis in Turkish-Syrian Relations: A Prospect Theory Approach

Turkish Studies, Vol.3, No.2, 2002, pp.44-68

This paper attempts to answer the question of what made the Turkish threats in the 1998 October crisis with Syria different from all others made over the last two decades; and what were the main reasons for Hafez Assad's capitulation vis-à-vis Turkish demands. Using the prospect theory, I argue that it was not the changing balance-of-power or the deterring effect of the Turkish-Israeli cooperation bringing about Turkish resolve and Syrian capitulation at the end of the crisis, but Hafez Assad's domestic policy constraints and health problems. Read more...

The Shift from War to Peace: Reconciliation of Sub-Identities and Overcoming Psychological Barriers in Israel

Review of International Affairs, Vol.1, No.2, 2002, pp.47-61

The pivotal argument of this paper is that states and political establishments develop two types of identities: self-identity and sub-identity. Mutually corresponding sub-identities are the medium through which states interact. The first part of the paper argues that each state allocates a unique sub-identity to every other individual state or political establishment with whom it engages in a relationship. Particularly, a shift from war to peace requires states to reconcile their respective sub-identities towards their enemies. Reconciliation is not a straightforward transition from an antagonistic mood to a pacifist environment. It is made possible only if the psychological barriers are overcome. The second part of this paper is devoted to a diagnosis of such psychological barriers that have long prevented Israel from successfully reconciling its sub-identity towards the Palestinian establishment. Read more...

The Implications of the Direct Elections in Israel

Turkish Yearbook of International Relations, Vol.30, 2001, pp.67-105

Like many immature and fledgling democracies Israel has suffered from the same disease, which causes instability, inefficiency, maladministration, corruption, bribery, extortion and anarchy. However, unlike other countries, Israel has invented its own medication to cure the ills of its democratic system. This unprecedented "magic remedy" provided Israel with the distinction of being the first democracy to a have direct election for its prime minister. This study is dedicated to the examination of this "untested remedy" and its side effects. The primary aim over the course of this paper will be to denote the implications of this reform upon the various aspects of Israeli politics. However, it should be noted that considering this reform merely as a change in the electoral system would be a great mistake. As we shall examine below, the direct elections have totally altered the form of government, party system, electoral campaigns, and the voting behaviors in the Jewish State. By allowing the split-ticket voting (i.e. the separate voting for prime minister and Knesset), the new system has contributed to the further fragmentation of Israeli party system and simultaneously strengthening the ethno-sectarian and single-issue parties at the expense of larger and ideological ones. In addition, while it has modified the traditional inter and intra-party politics and traditional coalition formation procedures, it also starkly exposed the absence of checks and balances within the system. Read more...

Does Islam Pose a Threat to the West?

Perceptions, Journal of International Affairs, Vol.5, No.2, 2000, pp.63-76

Few if any issues in international relations have generated as much myth as that of the alleged "Islamic Threat". Since the late 1970s, and more particularly, since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the issue of Islam and of its supposed challenge to the West has become a matter of enduring international preoccupation and one which politicians within Western European states, as well as a number of Islamic leaders, have chosen to highlight. Besides statesmen, scholars both from the West and the Muslim world have presented contradictory statements and opinions that have revolved around a highly pretentious concept, the "clash of civilizations". In assessing these differing opinions, we shall endeavor to establish a clear picture of the real situation -whether Islam poses an actual threat to the West beyond the fictions and stereotypes. In other words, our hypothesis, in contrast to Samuel Huntington's argument, is that the fundamental source of conflict in this so-called New World Order is still national interest and balance of power rather than cultural or religious divisions and it does not appear likely that this will change within a predictable future. In order to construct our thesis on concrete pillars, in the remainder, we will epitomize the confrontational and historical dimensions of the issue with specific references to some prominent sources and, before moving to a conclusion, we will provide a clear framework for the alleged Islamic threat. Read more...

Political Protest in an Islamic Language

Insight Turkey, Vol.2, No.1, 2000, pp.139-153

Throughout history, the magical language of Islam and its sacred vocabulary have been employed both by many Muslim and non-Muslim rulers, and politically or religiously motivated opposition movements in order to legitimize their attitudes before public opinion, criticize existing orders or mobilize individuals and institutions. This language is a flexible instrument by which governments excommunicate opposition leaders and opposition leaders launch holy wars against governments. Recently, this potent language has reappeared in the political arenas of many Muslim countries. Both legal and illegal opposition movements have increasingly employed the political language of Islam to gain popular support and overcome corrupt and discredited regimes. Therefore, in this paper the main purpose is to elucidate various and complex dimensions of this issue. In the rest of the study, an attempt will be made to find appropriate answers to the following questions: Is there such a thing as a "language of Islam"? Why did Islam become the language of political opposition? Why did no other ideology become the language for political opposition? Read more...