BARIS CAYLI MESSINA, PhD
BOOKS
THE AUTOCRAT'S PLAYBOOK:
HOW AUTHORITARIANS WEAPONIZE MORALITY TO DESTROY SOCIETIES
Forthcoming from the University of California Press, April 2027
"A powerful account of how authoritarian leaders make cruelty, exclusion, and repression appear morally justified."
Across democracies and autocracies alike, a growing form of authoritarian control uses moral slogans and patriotic scripts to quash dissent. These leaders increasingly justify repression in moral defense of families, children, values, or the nation itself.
In The Autocrat’s Playbook, Baris Cayli Messina introduces the “moral trap,” a novel framework that reveals how authoritarian regimes around the world use morality to create fear, stigmatize activists, criminalize dissent, and ultimately isolate people from one another. Drawing on historical and contemporary cases ranging from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to apartheid South Africa, Putin’s Russia, and the Trump-era United States and beyond, Messina shows how autocrats consolidate their power and manufacture obedience by reshaping what people believe is right, normal, and worthy.
Timely and provocative, The Autocrat’s Playbook offers a bold new way of understanding how social and political repression works and how collective resistance survives
A SLOW REVOLUTION:
THE BETRAYAL OF SICILIANS AND THEIR WAR ON THE MAFIA
Forthcoming from Cornell University Press, 2027
"A sweeping account of Sicily’s generations-long struggle against the mafia. A rare look at why some revolutions span centuries—and the human cost of that relentless fight."
A Slow Revolution immerses readers in Sicily’s enduring fight against the mafia; a battle that has spanned more than 150 years. It responds to a critical and urgent question: Why do some revolutions unfold so slowly, stretching across generations with a heavy toll of suffering?
Drawing on extensive archival documents and over a decade of ethnographic research, the book brings new insights into the human and temporal dimensions of this ongoing revolution. It reveals how resistance is shaped through collective suffering, multi-generational trauma, and a sustainable movement that transforms Sicily’s fight against the mafia into a painfully slow process.
A Slow Revolution is rooted in Sicily’s turbulent history and offers universal lessons on the pace of social change and the transformation of social norms. This is an essential text to understand how collective resistance becomes sustainable and why it has to face grim challenges in the face of an unreliable state and oppressive non-state authorities.
The book sheds new light on the catastrophic consequences of revolutionary attempts to oppose entrenched power systems and illustrates how these consequences are transformed into the weapons of slow revolutions.
REVIEWS-A SLOW REVOLUTION
FEDERICO VARESE
AUTHOR OF MAFIA LIFE
PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY
SCIENCES PO
Messina has a prominent voice and a strong, provocative stance in this area. The focus of A Slow Revolution on collective action in a context where mafia power is deeply embedded in society, extending well beyond formal institutions, will have a substantial impact.
LUCY RIAL
AUTHOR OF UNDER THE VOLCANA
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,
EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE
This is a remarkable history of popular resistance. With compelling detail, Messina explains why this story should be of interest to us all.
GIOVANNA SUMMERFIELD
CASTANOLI ENDOWED PROFESSOR OF ITALIAN AND FRENCH
AUBURN UNIVERSITY
A Slow Revolution is a significant accomplishment. Baris Cayli Messina provides great examples for unfamiliar readers alongside reflections for the readers who are familiar.
QUEER UNDER SIEGE:
HOW SOCIETIES PERSECUTE US AND HOW WE REBEL
Forthcoming from Temple University Press, 2027
"The first book to expose the global war on queer life as a unified system of repression, tracing how societies cast out, punish, and forget, and bearing witness to the rebellions that refuse to surrender."
What kind of social order survives by destroying those who reveal its hypocrisy? Across radically different political systems, from authoritarian regimes to liberal democracies, societies learn to render certain lives both indispensable and disposable, always present, always seen, and always under siege. This is the concealed mechanism of queer repression, and it has no borders.
Baris Cayli Messina draws on archives, court records, suicide letters, and activist testimony spanning the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia to map this machinery as a unified global system. He introduces moral eviction, punitive hypervisibility, and sanctioned oblivion as the interlocking mechanisms through which queer people are first stripped of empathy and belonging, then weaponized as spectacle by different regimes of punishment, then abandoned to collective silence. Queer Under Siege is the first book to give this system a name.
Where power erases, resistance writes back. From AIDS activists who transformed grief into collective infrastructure to digital networks keeping queer dissent alive under authoritarian surveillance, from teachers smuggling affirming pamphlets into hostile schools to communities building new rituals of mourning and collective care, Queer Under Siege documents the endurance, improvisation, and moral resistance of those who refuse to vanish. The book refuses despair as its final word, insisting that survival itself is a political act and that understanding how this war is waged is the first condition for refusing it.
"The first comprehensive analysis of the use of violence by militant groups across time and space."
How do militants rationalize violence and what are their motives? How do time and space shape their destiny? In Violence and Militants Baris Cayli explores these enduring questions by comparing violent episodes in towns and villages in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Balkans with today's zones of conflict from Afghanistan to the Middle East.
Placing history alongside the troubles of the present, Violence and Militants compares Christian militants who rebelled against the Ottoman Empire and four jihadist organizations of today: Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and Isis. Drawing on scholarship by political theorists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers, Cayli traces the root of dissent to a perceived deprivation that leads to aggressive protest and action. He argues that the rationalization of violence functions independently of time and geographical location, while politico-religious and socio-structural factors determine the scope of violence. Through a riveting narrative, this book uncovers how militant groups use revenge, ideals, and confrontation to generate fear and terror in the name of justice.
Breaking new ground, Violence and Militants is the first book to address this complex relationship across different periods of history.
VIOLENCE AND MILITANTS: FROM OTTOMAN REBELLIONS TO JIHADIST ORGANIZATIONS
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019
"A serious-minded and sophisticated treatment of a controversial and significant subject."
Richard English, Queen's University Belfast and author of Does Terrorism Work?: A History
"Cayli brings together, in an efficient and thoughtful manner, politics, sociology, anthropology, history, and philosophy to describe and explain violence in different time periods. His work has a rare storytelling finesse."
Canadian Journal of Political Science
"Violence and Militants is an insightful analysis focused on a key question: How do violent organizations and groups justify their use of violence in different times and places? In this empirically rich study Baris Cayli explores how structural and cultural violence operate in premodern and contemporary social contexts. Homing in on the behaviour of rebels and state authorities in the Ottoman world as well as violent organizations of today, this book offers a novel interpretation of the social processes involved in the rationalization and use of violence.”
Siniša Maleševic, University College Dublin and author of The Rise of Organised Brutality: A Historical Sociology of Violence
"Violence and Militants offers the reader an exciting journey to uncover the ravages of catastrophe."
Jeffrey Ian Ross, University of Baltimore and author of Political Terrorism: An Interdisciplinary Approach
"Cayli’s analytical, comparative, and moderate approach invites readers to engage in an intellectual dialogue over group manifestations of violence, rationalized in the name of ideological goals. The points raised are thought-provoking - not entertainment or distraction. Questions asked as well as answered generate new inquiries and new insights.”
A. Ezel Kural Shaw, co-author of The History of Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey
"Cayli's analysis is careful and rigorous, and his command of secondary literature is impressive, resulting in a broadly multidisciplinary study.
Kirkus Review
