Dr Baris Cayli Messina

I am a social and cultural critic and a feminist because of moral and practical necessity. I am Senior Research Fellow at the University of Derby in the UK. I had Visiting Professorship and Fellowship positions at the University of Palermo, LUMSA University, University of Oxford, and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. I am also Senior Research Affiliate at the TSAS, Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society and RUSI. You will find my research interests, teaching, publications and my current works by visiting the related pages of this personal website. My blog page covers current social, political and cultural issues. You can also view the photos that I took in the Photography section.
VIOLENCE AND MILITANTS:
From Ottoman Rebellions to Jihadist Organizations
(Kingston & Ontorio, London, Chicago: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019)
You can visit the webpage of the book by clicking here
MY LATEST RESEARCH


MAFIA AND THE SACK OF CITIES:
THE URBAN HISTORY OF CRIMINALISATION AND SOCIAL DECAY
Mafia organisations engaged illegal activities, destroyed the urban environment, dominated the construction sector, and extorted money from shopkeepers. This formidable amalgam of urban crimes created by different mafia groups across the world plundered different cities dramatically, changed architectural landscape, increased inequality gap, threatened powerless groups, violated fundamental human rights, and fostered a culture of lawlessness. We cannot think of the mafia independent from other factors such as rapid urbanisation, globalising capitalism, corruption, and limited social mobility of people living in the peripheries of cities. Providing a number of cases in the urban history of mafia expansion, I contend that all these factors enabled mafia organisations to sack cities and shape severely everyday life of people. This study demonstrates that the sack of cities by different mafia groups reveals the enormous network of state and non-state forces in which we can expose the complexity of political-criminal nexus and uncover the strategically connected hidden social networks by following the activities and contacts of mafia groups in cities.
Cayli, B. (2021). "Mafia and the Sack of Cities: The Urban History of Criminalisation and Social Decay" Urban History (Forthcoming)
THE CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
OF PROTEST AGAINST INJUSTICE
Cultural activities in a social setting offer us a common ground to conceive complex power dynamics. Culture has been a place of escape throughout history for dissident people who were oppressed and marginalized by a social system that created injustice for them. The cultural anthropology of protest against the perceived injustice exposes powerful actors who create injustice and uncovers how people demonstrate their reactions to injustice through different instruments in the cultural spectrum. The types of injustice and furious reaction to it can be found in films, caricatures, mimics, symbols, architecture, walking, photographs, and other cultural venues and materials enabling the protest. The identification of agencies producing injustice from the point view of vulnerable people clarifies the dilemmas of a formidable confrontation in a contested social place. The articles in this special issue show that this confrontation also needs to be revisited by centralising people who are subject to injustice which shapes different cultural forms at the same time. The cultural forms examined in this special issue indicate that the powerful authorities are not indestructible, and the layers of resistance delineate the roots of injustice and complex patterns of social transformation.
Cayli, B., (2020). "The Cultural Anthropology of Protest against the Perceived Injustice: Introduction to the Special Issue" Anthropological Notebooks 26(1); 1-12.