BARIS CAYLI MESSINA, PhD
A Social and Cultural CritiC
RESEARCH MONOGRAPHS
THE MORAL TRAP
HOW AUTOCRATS CRIMINALIZE AND DIVIDE SOCIETIES
Forthcoming from the University of California Press, April 2027
"A sharp, global narrative revealing how autocrats weaponize morality and strategically splinter communities to consolidate power."
The Moral Trap confronts a harsh truth and exposes how autocrats criminalize and divide societies with remarkable moral ambition. Across democracies and autocracies, leaders justify oppression through appeals to virtue—defending families, values, children, or the nation—while tightening the machinery of social control. A moralized social order confuses the public, fractures communities, and turns basic demands for justice into acts of suspicion.
Tracing this logic across time, 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. It introduces the concept of the “moral trap” to explain how regimes manufacture fear, stain activists with moral suspicion, criminalize dissent, fracture communities, and leave individuals cut off from one another. The Moral Trap combines rigorous analysis with human stories from the front lines. It shows how people navigate collective repression while resistance grows slowly and painfully.
Urgent in tone, global in reach, and grounded in interdisciplinary research, The Moral Trap speaks to anyone who feels the burden of standing up for their conscience and for what is right. It explains why demands for justice draw hostility, why integrity comes with a price tag, and how—despite criminalization—collective courage continues to rise.
A SLOW REVOLUTION
THE BETRAYAL OF SICILIANS AND THEIR WAR ON THE MAFIA
Forthcoming from Cornell University Press, 2026
"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.
"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 reveals parallels between 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. 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
"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
