Uriel Abulof

My name is Uriel Abulof, and I am an associate professor of politics, teaching at Tel-Aviv University and Princeton University’s LISD / Woodrow Wilson School. I received my PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was a Fulbright Scholar at NYU and Princeton University. I study political legitimation and violence, focusing on nationalism, revolutions and ethnic conflicts in, and beyond, the Middle East.

This beating heart of my research is Political Existentialism. It centers on humans as mortal and moral agents seeking meaning in a meaningless universe—and within the political domain. It constructs a bridge between the philosophical “ought” and the sociological “is” in the study of political legitimacy, tapping into the social actors’ own reasoning about right and wrong in the public sphere.