2006 Harold D. Lasswell Award

For the best dissertation in the field of policy studies.

Award Committee: J. Nicholas Ziegler, Chair, University of California, Berkeley; Marie Gotts, University of Pennsylvania; Andrew D. Grossman, Albion College

Recipient: Jonathan Ari Laurence, Boston College

Dissertation: "Managing Transnational Religion: Muslims and the State in Western Europe (1974-2004)"

Dissertation Chair: Stanley Hoffman, Harvard University

Citation: This dissertation makes an original and forceful argument to explain the distinctive politics shaping the integration of Muslim minorities in France, Germany, and Italy. Through impressive empirical fieldwork, the author illuminates an administrative “awakening” in all three countries.

Laurence shows how national leaders have moved in recent decades from a narrow strategy of dealing only with the official representatives of Islamic countries, i.e., “Embassy Islam,” to a more active strategy of engaging the independent political organizations that represent particular Muslim communities in different European countries. The political debates that accompanied the process varied, but Laurence shows how political leaders in all three countries explicitly tried to encourage the emergence of moderate interlocutors who might help create distinctive national versions of Islam in Europe. By documenting the consistency of this pattern across three major cases, Laurence provides a model of comparative research and delineates the possibilities as well as the limits of enlightened leadership in an era of identity politics.