This article examines the relationship between state-provided religious education and support for Islamists. It first provides a historical overview of this debate in the Egyptian context. It then examines a survey of young adults from post-Arab-Spring Egypt, the largest education market in the Middle East and North Africa region. The findings show that recipients of state-provided Islamic education, Azharites, are more likely to hold favorable views of Islamists. This is likely attributed to the ideological alignment between Azharites and Islamists, since both favor a bigger public role of religion and stricter adherence to conservative social norms. However, the analysis does not support the notion that Azharites view Islamists as competitors in the religious market for followers. These results inform policy debates on Islamic education in Muslim countries and illustrate the limitations of mass indoctrination in authoritarian settings.

For many decades, scholars assumed voluntary compliance and citizens’ commitment to a regime’s principles and values to be critical for regime stability. A growing literature argues that indoctrination is essential to achieve this congruence. However, the absence of a clear definition and comprehensive comparative measures of indoctrination have hindered systematic research on such issues. In this paper, we fill this gap by synthesizing literature across disciplines to clarify the concept of indoctrination, focusing particularly on the politicization of education and the media. We then outline how the abstract concept can be operationalized, and introduce and validate an original expert-coded dataset on indoctrination that covers 160 countries from 1945 to the present. The dataset should facilitate a new generation of empirical inquiry on the causes and consequences of indoctrination.

In this paper, I will defend a communitarian perspective on the so-called “hinge propositions” (hinges, for short). Accordingly, I will argue that hinges play a normative role, in the sense that, among other things, they govern the mechanisms of social inclusion/exclusion. In particular, I will examine the so-called “religious hinges”; and I will argue that such hinges, being the product of mere indoctrination, are particularly effective in shaping boundaries among communities. Finally, with the help of Peter Munz's theory of altruism, I will attempt to explain why religious hinges play the role they do.

Dictators depend on a committed bureaucracy to implement their policy preferences. But how do they induce loyalty and effort within their civil service? The authors study indoctrination through forced military service as a cost-effective strategy for achieving this goal. Conscription allows the regime to expose recruits, including future civil servants, to intense “political training” in a controlled environment, which should improve system engagement. To test this hypothesis, the authors analyze archival data on over 370,000 cadres from the former German Democratic Republic. Exploiting the introduction of mandatory service in the gdr in 1962 for causal identification, they find a positive effect of conscription on bureaucrats’ system engagement. Additional analyses indicate that this effect likely did not result from deep norm internalization. Findings are more compatible with the idea that political training familiarized recruits with elite preferences, allowing them to behave strategically in accordance with the rules of the game.

I argue that none of the main accounts of autonomy in the literature can explain the fact that people who undergo a certain subtle but powerful kind of indoctrination are not autonomous or self-governing in reflectively acquiring and endorsing the views, values, goals, and practical commitments that they are successfully indoctrinated to adopt. I suggest that, assuming there are historical conditions on autonomous reasoning and reflective endorsement, there is a condition that specifically concerns emotions: the person’s emotional state and dispositions, and her web of emotional dependencies. I explain what we know so far about the kind of indoctrination on which I focus, and I motivate the claim that people who are successfully indoctrinated in this way are not self-governed in reflectively acquiring and endorsing even the first views and values that they adopt as a result of indoctrination. I argue that this heteronomy is not explained by any of the accounts that postulate historical conditions on autonomy: neither by classical accounts such as Rousseau’s and Piaget’s, nor by so-called historical accounts in the contemporary literature, nor by relational accounts. I argue that an accurate account of autonomy must include an emotional condition on autonomous reasoning and reflective endorsement that goes beyond the emotional conditions postulated or implied by historical accounts, and I offer a tentative sketch of this condition.

The “organizational life” is an important part of the daily existence of North Koreans. Every adult in North Korea has to be a participant in a multitude of rituals that serve a dual purpose of surveillance and indoctrination. In this article, we describe how the organizational life is arranged and also explain the ways it contributes to maintaining the domestic stability of North Korea and to manufacturing consent for the current regime. The study is based largely on refugee interviews.