Abstract:

This book focuses upon three core questions. Is democratic governance good for economic prosperity? Has this type of regime accelerated progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals, social welfare, and human development? Does it generate a peace-dividend and reduce conflict at home? This book advances the argument that both liberal democracy and governance capacity need to be strengthened in parallel for effective development, within the constraints posed by structural conditions. The argument is demonstrated using systematic evidence gathered from countries worldwide during recent decades and selected cases illustrating the effects of regime change on human security.

About the speaker:

Pippa Norris is the McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at Harvard University and ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. She is the author of a dozen related books published by Cambridge University Press, including Driving Democracy (2008) and Democratic Deficit (2011). Her contribution to the humanities and social science has been recognized most recently by the award of the 2011 Johann Skytte prize (with Inglehart) and the 2011 Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellowship.

Abstract:

Nearly two years after the Tunisian uprisings launched a massive wave of regional protest across the Arab world, many important and highly contested questions remain. How has the protest wave affected the dynamics of regional politics? Has the protest wave ended, or is it likely to recur? What explains the timing, the accomplishments and the limitations of that protest wave? What does the survival of many Arab regimes, the frustration of revolutionaries, the rise of Islamist movements in electoral politics, and the spiraling conflict in Syria mean for hopes of democratization and peaceful political change?

About the speaker:

Marc Lynch is associate professor of political science and international affairs at The George Washington University, where he directs the Institute for Middle East Studies. He also directs the Project on Middle East Political Science, edits the Middle East Channel for ForeignPolicy.com and the Columbia University Press book series Columbia Studies on Middle East Politics, and is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. His most recent publications include The Arab Uprising (PublicAffairs 2012), Islamists in a Changing Middle East (ForeignPolicy 2012), and Blogs and Bullets II: New Media and the Arab Spring (US Institute for Peace).

Abstract:

Marking the publication of Lina Khatib's latest book Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle, this seminar focuses on the evolution of political expression in the Middle East over the past decade, highlighting the visual dimension of power struggles between citizens and leaders in Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, Libya, and Syria.

About the speaker:

Lina Khatib is a co-founder and Program Manager of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She joined Stanford University in 2010 from the University of London where she was an Associate Professor. Her research is firmly interdisciplinary and focuses on the intersections of politics, media, and social factors in relation to the politics of the Middle East. She is also a consultant on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, US public diplomacy towards the Middle East, and political media and conflict in the Arab world, as well as on the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She has an active interest in the link between track two dialogue and democratization policy. She is also a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and, from 2010-2012, a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

Lina is a founding co-editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, a multidisciplinary journal concerned with politics, culture and communication in the region, and in 2009 co-edited (with Klaus Dodds) a special issue of the journal on geopolitics, public diplomacy and soft power in the Middle East. She also edited the Journal of Media Practice from 2007-2010. She is one of the core authors of the forthcoming Arab Human Development Report (2012) published by the UNDP.

She has written two books, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (IB Tauris 2006), which is a study of the link between international relations and film, focusing on 25 years of cinematic representation of politics in the region (1980-2005), from the Arab-Israeli conflict to the Gulf War to Islamic fundamentalism, and Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond (IB Tauris 2008). The book takes a socio-political approach to the study of Lebanese cinema over the last thirty years, focusing on the issues of Lebanese national identity, history, sectarian conflict, and memory of the Civil War.

Lina has recently finished writing a book titled Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle for IB Tauris. The book examines the power struggles among states, other political actors, and citizens in the region that are expressed through visuals, and focuses on case studies from Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Iran, with a focus on the role of the image as a political tool in the Arab Spring. She has also recently led a multidisciplinary research project on US public diplomacy in the digital age, in collaboration with the University of Oxford and the University of Wolverhampton, the outcome of which will appear in the Middle East Journal in 2012.

Before joining the academic field, Lina worked in broadcast journalism in Lebanon. She is a frequent commentator on the Middle East in the media with appearances on Al-Jazeera (Arabic and English), CNN, BBC, Sky News and other media outlets across the globe

Abstract:

Lucan Way will present the initial findings of his new book project (co-authored with Steven Levitsky, Harvard University), "Revolutionary Struggle and Authoritarian Durability after the Cold War." The project examines why some authoritarian leaders are capable of surviving severe economic crises, large-scale protest, or serious electoral challenges while others are not. We focus on how legacies of violent revolutionary struggle have shaped the capacity of regimes across the globe to deal with crises at the end of the Cold War, when autocrats faced their most serious challenges. Most interpretations of durability focus on the flow of benefits or patronage to top regime officials. By contrast, we will argue that patronage alone is not a very effective source of elite cohesion. Institutionalized patronage may ensure elite cooperation during normal times, but it often fails to do so during crises. The most cohesive regimes, we contend, complement patronage with nonmaterial ties. In particular, we argue that the identities, and social and organizational ties forged during periods of sustained, violent, and ideologically-driven conflict serve as a critical source of cohesion---and durability---in authoritarian regimes

About the speaker:

Lucan Way is associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on democratic transitions and the evolution of non-democratic rule in cross-regional perspective. He is best known for his work on hybrid or competitive authoritarian rule. His book, "Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War" (with Steven Levitsky), was published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press. He has also published in articles in Comparative Politics, Journal of Democracy, Perspectives on Politics, Politics & Society, Studies in Comparative and International Development, World Politics, as well as a number of area studies journals and book chapters. Most recent articles include "Deer in Headlights: Incompetence and Weak Authoritarianism" in Slavic Review and "Beyond Patronage: Violent Struggle, Ruling Party Cohesion and Authoritarian Durability" (with Steven Levitsky) in Perspectives on Politics. He is completing a book: Pluralism by Default and the Sources of Political Competition in the Former Soviet Union and is beginning a new project exploring the impact of violent revolutionary origins on authoritarian durability after the Cold War. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy and is in residence at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law for the fall of 2012.

Abstract:

Democracy in the developing world is generally outliving expectations, but not outperforming them. Nearly four decades after the “Third Wave of democratization” began and more than two decades after the Cold War ended, there has not been any “third reverse wave” of authoritarianism. Political scientists need to transcend our rightful concerns with how and why young democracies collapse or consolidate, and devote more attention to considering how and why they careen. I define democratic careening as regime instability and uncertainty sparked by intense conflict between political actors deploying competing visions of democratic accountability. It occurs when actors who conceive of democracy as requiring substantial inclusivity of the entire populace (i.e. vertical accountability) clash with rivals who value democracy for its constraints against excessive concentrations of unaccountable power, particularly in the political executive (i.e. horizontal accountability). India and Indonesia will be shown to be cases where vertical and horizontal accountability have recently been advanced in tandem more than at each other’s expense, which has kept democratic careening to a relative minimum. By contrast, Thailand and Taiwan have recently experienced more serious clashes between proponents of vertical accountability and defenders of horizontal accountability at a national scale, although in informatively distinctive ways.

About the speaker:

Dan Slater is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His book manuscript examining how divergent historical patterns of contentious politics have shaped variation in state power and authoritarian durability in seven Southeast Asian countries, entitled Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia, was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics series in 2010. He is also a co-editor of Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis (Stanford University Press, 2008), which assesses the contributions of Southeast Asian political studies to theoretical knowledge in comparative politics. His published articles can be found in disciplinary journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, and Studies in Comparative International Development, as well as more area-oriented journals such as Indonesia, Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, and the Taiwan Journal of Democracy. He has recently received four best-article awards and two best-paper awards from various organized sections of the American Political Science Association and American Sociological Association.