Farid Hafez

Farid Hafez (born 23 December 1981) is an Austrian political scientist and holds the endowed chair of Class of 1955 Distinguished Visiting Professor of International Studies at Williams College and senior researcher at Georgetown University's The Bridge Initiative.

Before his role at Williams College, he was at the department of political science and sociology at the University of Salzburg.

Hafez was born in Ried im Innkreis, Austria on 23 December 1981.

From 2008 to 2010, Hafez did research at the department of law of religion and culture at the University of Vienna, before he started teaching at the Muslim Teachers Training College in Vienna (2009 to 2014).

After moving to Austria's capital, Vienna, and taking his first degree in political science, he finished his studies and earned his PhD at the University of Vienna in 2009.

In 2009, Farid Hafez was awarded was awarded the Bruno Kreisky award (Anerkennungspreis) of the Karl-Renner-Institute for the political book of the year 2009 for his book ‘Islamophobia in Austria’.

The Austrian Culture Magazine named Farid Hafez as one of 100 „Austrians with a special future“.

Hafez publishes regularly in Austrian and international news media like Haaretz, Middle East Eye, Daily Sabah, Der Standard and Die Presse.

He is a frequent interview partner for international media, among them BBC, The Washington Post and Democracy Now

Hafez identifies with what he calls the "racism studies-informed postcolonial approach" in studying Islamophobia.

"Many of the measures taken to regulate Islam-state relations reveal an approach that on one side attempts to give Islam a place in their society, while on the other side clearly refers to a stereotypical imagination of the Muslim, where the notion of Europe stands for enlightenment, modernity and progressiveness, while Islam and Muslims represent the opposite. Hence, we can observe a notion of ‘civilizing’ Islam that goes back to colonial times and introduces a division between the good and the bad Muslim; the former who submits to the state and its rules, versus the latter, who remains the uncivilized, barbaric, alien Muslim, prone to extremisms and fanaticism and incapable of fitting into modernity. The Islam dispositives revealed here show that the states legitimize their interference based on this implicitly reproduced imagination of the bad Muslims, and thus endeavor to ‘civilize’ Muslims subjects, reminding us again of the “white man's burden.”"

Hafez's most quoted article is 'Shifting borders: Islamophobia as common ground for building pan-European right-wing unity,' which appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Patterns of Prejudice.

In this article, Hafez argues that "Islamophobia has become a useful tool for right-wing parties to mobilize electors in many European nation-states" and that concomitantly there happened a shift by formerly antisemitic far-right parties "to gain wider acceptance in mainstream societies by distancing themselves from a former antisemitic profile."

Hafez's concept of 'Islamophobic Populism' has gained some attraction in the research of contemporary far-right political parties in Europe.

He developed the concept of 'Islamophobic Populism' by synthesizing the concepts of populism, Islamophobia with the help of critical discourse analysis.

The flagship publication, co-edited by Hafez and authored by a collective of more than 40 authors.

from across Europe is the annual European Islamophobia Report.

Authors include Prof. of English literature Olivier Esteves from France, sociologist James Carr from Ireland, political scientist Ineke van der Valk from the Netherlands, anthropologist Sindre Bangstad and Holocaust-studies Professor Cora Alexa Døvingfrom Norway, Polish social scientist Konrad Pędziwiatr, historian Hikmet Karčić from Bosnia, sociologist Aleksandra Lewicki from Germany, Italian sociologist Alfredo Alietti, social scientist Ana Frank from Ljubljana, religious studies Professor Mattias Gardell from Sweden, and historian Aristotle Kallis from Greece.

Since 2021, the report is published by Leopold Weiss Institute together with several US American institutions such as UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute headed by John A. Powell, Rutgers University's Center for Security, Race and Rights.

In 2010, he founded the Islamophobia Studies Yearbook In 2015, he created the European Islamophobia Report, which he now edits along with political scientist Enes Bayrakli for the Leopold Weiss Institute, LWI, based in Vienna, Austria.

Farid Hafez has also published on Islam and the Far-Right for Brookings Institution.

He is a faculty affiliate of the Rutgers University's Center for Security, Rights and Race and a member of the affiliated faculty of the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project (IRDP) at University of California, Berkeley.

He is also an affiliated faculty and scholars-member of the Center for Right-Wing Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and the editor of numerous works on Islamophobia.

In 2014, he was visiting scholar at Columbia University.

In 2015, he was part of the faculty of The Ariane de Rothschild Fellowship.

Since 2021, he has been visiting professor of international studies at Williams College.

In 2022, he became teaching fellow in human rights at St. Francis College in New York City.

Its 2015 edition was presented by MEP Josef Weidenholzer and MEP Afzal Khan, who belong both to the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.

During the academic year 2016/17, he was Fulbright-Botstiber Visiting Professor of Austrian-American Studies at UC Berkeley.

Hafez had taught at the department of Oriental studies at the University of Vienna as well as at the University of Klagenfurt.

His research at the department of political science and sociology at the University of Salzburg focused on Muslim youth movements in Europe.

He also teaches at a number of academic non-universitarian institutions such as the Global Citizenship Alliance.

The 2017 edition was presented by Wajid Khan.

Its 2018 edition was presented by the British member of the European Parliament for the British Green Party, the Rt.

Honorable Magid Magid.

In 2023, the social democratic MEP Joao Albuquerque (Portugal) supported the discussion of the report by the Brussels-based European Network on Religion & Belief (ENORB).

He earned his Habilitation at the University of Salzburg in 2019.

Shortly before submitting his dissertation, in which he analyzed parliamentary debates on the ban of mosques and minarets in two Austrian counties, he published his first book ‘Islamophobia in Austria’ together with Middle East scholar John Bunzl.

Since then, Hafez published widely on Islamophobia.

In 2020, Farid Hafez was awarded the "Islam on the Edges"-price by Shenandoah University's Center for Islam in the Contemporary World (CICW).