Past Projects

The Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR) has moved to the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California, Berkeley.  Explore past projects within CDTR here.  For future projects, please visit sharedsacredsites.net.

CDTR was founded in 2006 with a grant from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs to develop the academic subfield of religion and international affairs within the study of international relations.  Subsequent Luce-funded projects have included research on religion and human rights pragmatism; shari’a and women’s issues; Islam and democracy and shared sacred sites.  In 2014 CDTR moved under the auspices of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life.  Its three projects at that time were Sufi Islam and 21st Century Politics; Islam, Democracy and Toleration in Muslim Nations; and Shared Sacred Sites and the Politics of Pluralism.

Project Directors

Alfred C. Stepan
Founding Director, CDTR

Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government; Director, Center for Democracy, Toleration and Religion

Alfred Stepan (Ph.D., Columbia, 1969) teaches and conducts research in the areas of comparative politics, theories of democratic transitions, federalism, and the world’s religious systems and democracy. He has published Arguing Comparative Politics; Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe; South America and Post-Communist Europe (with J.J. Linz); Politics, Society, and Democracy: Comparative Studies (ed. with H.E. Chebabi); Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone; The Breakdoown of Democratic Regimes (ed. with J.J. Linz); The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective; The Military on Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil.

Karen Barkey
Director, CDTR

Karen Barkey is the Haas Distinguished Chair of Religious Diversity and Professor of Sociology at University of California, Berkeley.  Her works include: Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Cornell University Press, 1999) and Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Her current research examines shared sacred spaces and the politics of pluralism.