Gulnaz Sibgatullina is Assistant Professor of Illiberal Regimes at the University of Amsterdam. She studies how religion shapes political authority, working across the fields of religious studies, political theory, and international relations. Her broader research focuses on alternative visions of social and global order, Islamic thought, and the sociolinguistics of religion.

She currently leads the ERC-funded project Illiberal Religious Internationalism in Africa (IRInA), which examines how religious networks contribute to emerging global power dynamics, particularly in African contexts. The project focuses on how religious ideas are translated across regions, adapted to local settings, and gain traction in debates on identity, sovereignty, and postcolonial legacies. It builds on her earlier work on Russia, including the role of the Russian Orthodox Church and the state’s management of Islam, and how these models travel beyond Europe.

Previously, she held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship to study the Murabitun movement, an international network of European and American converts to Islam. The project examined how religious conversion can serve as a critique of liberal modernity and how Islamic thought circulates within Western countercultural and political contexts.

From 2019 to 2021, she was a member of the ERC “The European Qur’an. Islamic Scripture in European Culture and Religion 1150–1850 (EuQu)” synergy team, where she studied the politics of Qur’an translation into Russian and Tatar. Between 2014 and 2019, she completed her doctoral research within the project “The Russian Language of Islam,” led by Prof. Michael Kemper and Prof. Jos Schaeken and funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). This work analysed how practices of language and translation shape religious life, authority, and intercommunal relations in post-Soviet Russia.

Contributor to Raam op Rusland (in Dutch)

Non-resident fellow at the Illiberalism Studies Program

Author and host of the ACES Cast: Listen on Spotify and Apple