Congratulations to Charles Johnson, winner of the CCAS 2025 Druze Student Paper Prize. Johnson, a graduate of the University of Kansas, received the award for his paper, “A Modern Minority Alliance? Right-Wing Israeli Discourse after the Fall of Assad.” The paper prize was launched earlier this year to highlight an exceptional submission of written academic work that focuses on the Druze. The contest was open to both undergraduate and graduate students studying fields in the humanities and social sciences at U.S.-based institutions.
“I came to this subject through my four years of undergraduate research with the University of Kansas’ Druze Studies Project under the mentorship of Dr. Rami Zeedan,” wrote Johnson. “Due in large part to his encouragement, I undertook this project investigating right-wing Israeli media discussions of the Druze community in Syria, where I saw parallels to a ‘minority alliance’ foreign policy historians had generally declared extinct following the Lebanese Civil War.”
Johnson holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kansas, where he majored in history, political science, and international studies while focusing on interactions between Middle Eastern states and minority communities in the region. Johnson now works as a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Middle East Program. His research focuses on political mediation in protracted conflicts throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
CCAS also supports an American Druze Foundation post-doctoral fellowship. Click here for more information.