BARIS CAYLI MESSINA, PhD
I am an interdisciplinary scholar of power, justice, violence, and society. My work moves across sociology, political science, history, philosophy, and anthropology and is driven by a central question of how political and social orders sustain themselves. I examine the mechanisms through which state and non-state authority is enforced, including violence, moralisation, criminalisation, and marginalisation. I also study how communities resist and reshape these processes across diverse historical and contemporary contexts.
I am Associate Professor at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lincoln. I am the author of four research monographs, published or forthcoming with McGill-Queen's University Press, Cornell University Press, the University of California Press, and Temple University Press. My research has secured £2.9 million in competitive funding as Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator.
My editorial leadership roles include Book Series Editor for Temple Studies in Criminalization, History, and Society, published by Temple University Press, and Editor-in-Chief of the International Social Science Journal (Wiley/UNESCO).
I am very happily married to Gioacchino Messina.
Four books. One question:
How power breaks societies — and how resistance remakes them.
Across five continents, societies have perfected a system for destroying queer lives while maintaining the illusion of innocence. Queer Under Siege is the first book to map this as a unified global architecture of repression, drawing on archives, court records, suicide letters, and activist testimony. At a moment when the assault on queer existence is intensifying worldwide, this book bears witness to both the cruelty of repressive social orders and the rebellions that refuse to surrender.
A sharp, global narrative revealing how autocrats weaponize morality and strategically splinter communities to consolidate power. Drawing on archival research and social and political historical analysis, the book moves from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to East Germany and apartheid South Africa, and from contemporary Turkey and Poland to the United States, Iran, Israel, Russia, and beyond.
A sweeping account of Sicily's generations-long struggle against the mafia and a rare exploration of why some revolutions span centuries. Based on extensive longitudinal ethnographic and archival research, the book brings a new lens to the modern and contemporary history of Sicily and Italy, revealing the human cost of that relentless fight.
The first comprehensive comparative study of militant violence, tracing its evolution from Ottoman rebellions to contemporary jihadist organizations across Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Europe. Built on extensive archival research spanning centuries and borders, the book reveals how the dynamics of armed militancy persist, adapt, and resurface across vastly different political landscapes.
I wrote for Social Europe regarding how chronic uncertainty paralyses democratic publics and becomes a tool of power.
