Cole Bunzel

About

A Hoover Fellow since 2019, Cole Bunzel is a historian and scholar of the contemporary Middle East, specializing in the history of Arabian Peninsula, Islamic theology and law, and modern Islamic radicalism. His first book, Wahhābism: The History of a Militant Islamic Movement (Princeton, 2023), examines the history and religious doctrine of the controversial Wahhabi movement, a puritanical Islamic reformist movement that arose in central Arabia in the mid-eighteenth century, giving rise to the ancestral polity of the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Among his current book projects is one focused on the recent efforts by Saudi Arabia to refashion the founding narrative of the early Saudi state in the eighteenth century in such a way as to jettison the founding role of Wahhabism altogether—an endeavor that is of a piece with Saudi Arabia’s ongoing transformation under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. A second book project, on which he is working concurrently, is a study of the history and ideology of Sunni jihadism, the ideological movement associated with al-Qaida and the Islamic State, with a focus on those ideologues and scholars most critical to its shaping and development.

In addition to his more scholarly work, Bunzel writes widely about developments in Middle East politics and in the world of Sunni jihadism, including for outlets such as Foreign Affairs and the blog Jihadica, which he edits. Some of his publications include the monographs From Paper State to Caliphate: The Ideology of the Islamic State (Brookings Institution, 2015), The Kingdom and the Caliphate: Duel of the Islamic States (Carnegie Endowment, 2016), and Jihadism on Its Own Terms: Understanding a Movement (Hoover Institution, 2017).

Bunzel received a B.A. and Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and an M.A. in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. At Princeton he received the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, the university’s top honor for graduate students, as well as the Bayard and Cleveland Dodge Memorial Dissertation Prize for best Ph.D. dissertation in Near Eastern Studies. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Law School’s Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization.