BARIS CAYLI messina, PhD
A Social and Cultural CritiC
RESEARCH MONOGRAPHS
A SLOW REVOLUTION (In press, forthcoming by December 2026)
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 forged through collective suffering, multi-generational trauma, and a sustainable movement that transforms Sicily’s fight against the mafia into a painfully slow but unrelenting process. Despite the corrosive forces of state institutions and the mafia’s persistent power, this war continues to evolve.
While deeply rooted in Sicily’s turbulent history, A Slow Revolution 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 endures 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 challenge entrenched power systems and illustrates how these consequences are transformed into the weapons of slow revolutions.
VIOLENCE AND MILITANTS: FROM OTTOMAN REBELLIONS TO JIHADIST ORGANIZATIONS
Montreal, Kingston, London, Chicago: 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
"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
