Meet the Director

After a decade of leadership by BC Law Professor Vlad Perju, the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy has a new director. 

Jonathan Laurence arrived on the Heights in 2005, shortly after defending his PhD thesis, in comparative politics, at Harvard. Since then, Boston College's political science department has been Prof. Laurence’s home base, but his research has frequently taken him out of town. In the course of his career, he has conducted interviews, archival research, and other fieldwork in more than a dozen countries and held fellowships in France, Germany and Italy. He was also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC for over a decade, during which he delivered briefings to diplomats and analysts, volunteered on the Foreign Policy committee of two presidential campaigns, led a team of analysts at the State Department, and addressed lawmakers on Capitol Hill. His work has been recognized with a Berlin prize fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin and multiple professional awards from the American Political Science Association, including twice for Best Book in Religion and Politics in 2013 and 2022.

His years of study and fieldwork in Western Europe, Turkey, and North Africa have also given him a front-row seat to formal and informal political life in many countries. His research and commentary on international affairs have been featured on CNN and in the Washington Post, and he has published essays in the New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 

Under Prof. Laurence’s leadership, in addition to its annual themes, the Clough Center will pursue an ongoing, multi-year exploration of “Religion and Democracy.” Prof. Laurence’s research focuses on the interaction of religion and politics in public life, and the comparison of religion-state relations across political contexts. Such issues were central to his first two books, Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France (2006), and The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims: The State’s Role in Minority Integration (2012). Laurence’s latest book, Coping with Defeat: Islam, Catholicism, and the Modern State (2021) is also his most ambitious yet. It explores the topic of state-religion relations in great depth and breadth, developing a geographically and historically wide-ranging comparative analysis of Islamic and Catholic political-religious empires in Western Europe, Turkey and North Africa.

For Coping with Defeat, Laurence visited Vatican and Ottoman Archives and interviewed senior officials responsible for Islamic affairs or public religious education in Turkey and North Africa. On the basis of this extensive research, Laurence documents centuries of religious and political institution-building, right up to the present day. Strikingly, he argues, Catholicism and Sunni Islam have historically employed analogous strategies for responding to their cumulative loss of their political power.  For this reason, Laurence suggests, their comparison has much to teach contemporary democracies–and contemporary religious leaders–about how to combat religious extremism, preserve the spiritual authority of religious traditions in “secular” states, and promote civil peace in polarized societies. Click here to learn more about the book.

Since its release in 2021, Coping with Defeat has already attracted attention in the academy and the public sphere. The Wall Street Journal called the book a “refreshing, provocative work,” and the Economist described it as a “closely argued, contrarian piece of scholarship.” In 2022, the American Political Science Association recognized it as the best book in religion and politics.