Faculty Profile

BIO

Pauline Jones is the Director of the Center for Political Studies. She will assume to role after completing her sabbatical for the 2025-26 academic year as a senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Pauline Jones is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan (UM) and the Edie N. Goldenberg Endowed Director for the Michigan in Washington Program. She is also the Founder and Director of the Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum. Previously, she served as the Director of UM’s Islamic Studies Program (2011-14) and International Institute (2014-20). Her past work has contributed to understanding institutional change, economic development, and religious regulation in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), and more broadly, to explaining the impact of religious regulation in Muslim-majority countries (MMCs) on citizens’ political attitudes and behavior, identifying the factors that affect compliance with health mitigation policies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, and examining the influence that evoking historical memory has on public support for foreign assistance.

She is currently engaged in two major research projects: first, exploring the relationship between religious regulation and autocracy in modern-day MMCs, focusing on Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan; and second, explaining how authoritarian regimes rebuild core support following mass protests by creating false narratives and introducing moderate reforms, focusing on Kazakhstan. She has published articles in several leading academic and policy journals, including the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Current History, Foreign Affairs, the International Journal of Public Health, and Security Studies (forthcoming).

She is author (or co-author) of five books: Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia: Power, Perceptions, and Pacts (Cambridge 2002); The Transformation of Central Asia: States and Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence (Cornell 2003); Oil is not a Curse: Ownership Structure and Institutions in the Soviet Successor States (Cambridge 2010), Islam, Society, and Politics in Central Asia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), and most recently The Oxford Handbook on Politics in Muslim Societies (Oxford 2021).