Ceren Lord

Dr Ceren Lord is a Research Officer at the LSE Middle East Centre, where she is working on developing a major new research project on secularity in the Middle East and North Africa, directed by Dr Katerina Dalacoura.

Ceren holds a PhD in Government from the LSE, an MSt in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BSc in Government and Economics from the LSE.

Prior to joining LSE, she held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR), University of Oxford, where she led an independent research project on conflict and post-conflict identity strategies; she remains a Research Associate at DPIR. Before that, she was a Sasakawa Peace Foundation Postdoctoral Researcher in Middle East Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA), University of Oxford, where her work examined the intersection of sectarianism and geopolitics and its relation to minoritisation and nation-building in the Middle East. She has held teaching positions at the University of Oxford, LSE, and SOAS. Alongside her academic career, Ceren has extensive professional experience as an economist and country risk analyst in the finance sector, covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Her research spans three interconnected themes. The first concerns secularity and political behaviour, asking how the degree of proximity between religious authority and the state shapes contentious politics: a core focus is how Islamic institutions, which typically closely integrated with state structures in Muslim-majority contexts, define the bounds of citizenship, influence Islamisation and the emergence of Islamist movements, and shape patterns of radicalisation. The second examines the relationship between identity and conflict behaviour: exploring the strategies ethnic organisations adopt in the wake of civil war, what these mean for conflict dynamics, and their consequences for post-conflict settlements and minority communities. The third is concerned with path-dependence and institutional change, asking how legacies of state formation and institutional design shape the dynamics and limits of regime change.

She is the author of Religious Politics in Turkey: From the Birth of the Republic to the AKP (Cambridge University Press, 2018; Turkish translation: Cumhuriyet'in Doğuşundan Akp'ye Türkiye'de Din Siyaseti, İletişim, 2023), and has published articles in Government and Opposition, Nations and Nationalism, and the Middle East Journal. She is currently completing a monograph, Divided We Stand: Identity Strategies in the Wake of Conflict, on the comparative politics of ethnic organisational behaviour in civil wars. She serves as Associate Editor of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and Lead Editor of the British Institute at Ankara Contemporary Turkey monograph series (Bloomsbury/I.B. Tauris).