Mag. Dr. Dr. habil. Hüseyin Cicek

Priv.-Doz. Mag. Dr. Hüseyin Çiçek is a political scientist (PhD, habil.) specializing in authoritarian regimes, political violence, and ideological transformation processes.

He earned his PhD from the University of Innsbruck and completed his habilitation at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in 2021. From 2021 to 2022, he served as deputy and then acting director of the Department of Islamic-Theological Studies at the University of Vienna.

He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Research Centre Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society (RaT).

Çiçek studied law, political science, philosophy, and religious studies at the universities of Innsbruck, New Orleans, and Erlangen. His research bridges political science, ideology critique, and sociology. His doctoral dissertation explored martyrdom, identity, and violence in Christianity and Islam; his habilitation expanded this scope to include religion, migration, and digital antisemitism.

He has taught at the University of Vienna, the University of Education Weingarten (Alevi Theology), the Sigmund Freud University in Vienna, and as a Fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. His current research projects focus on antisemitic discourses in the Turkish-Muslim context after October 7, 2023, the geopolitics of religious institutions, and the ideological transformation of Islamist movements.

Research interests: authoritarianism, radicalization, digital propaganda, politics of memory, religion and statehood, ideological mobilization.