Shibley Telhami holds the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, and is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Previously, he was the Director of the Near Eastern Studies Program at Cornell University and has taught at Ohio State University, the University of Southern California, Princeton University, Columbia University, Swarthmore College, and the University of California at Berkeley. His publications include Power and Leadership in International Bargaining: The Path to the Camp David Accords (Columbia University Press, 1990); International Organizations and Ethnic Conflict, ed. with Milton Esman (Cornell University Press, 1995); and Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East , ed. with Michael Barnett (forthcoming, Cornell University Press, 2001); and numerous articles on international politics and Middle Eastern affairs.

Professor Telhami has actively been bridging the academic and policy world. He served as advisor to the United States delegation to the United Nations during the Iraq-Kuwait crisis, and was on the staff of Congressman Lee Hamilton. He is the author of a report on Persian Gulf security for the Council on Foreign Relations, and the co-drafter of a Council report on the Arab-Israeli peace process. Professor Telhami is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the advisory committee of Human Rights Watch/Middle East. He has been a member of the American delegation of the Trilateral American/Israeli/Palestinian Anti-Incitement Committee mandated by the Wye River Agreement between Israel and the Palestinians and has a weekly radio commentary broadcasting widely over the Middle East.

He received his B.A. from the Queens College of the City University of New York (1974), M.A. from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley (1978), and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (1986).

Professor Telhami will be reporting on his latest poll of Arab public opinion and interpreting the results on key issues.

Political Science has very few "accepted truths." One of the most prominent is the claim that countries endowed with natural resources, particularly mineral wealth, are doomed to suffer from poor economic performance, unbalanced growth, weak states, and authoritarian regimes - often referred to as the "resource curse." This claim, however, is not without its critics. In recent years, a few scholars have contended that the resource curse is essentially a myth. Rather, the main culprit is the absence of viable political, economic, and social institutions, such as secure property rights and an effective bureaucracy. Yet, their emphasis on the importance of strong institutions is entirely consistent with the conventional wisdom that they are challenging. The main point of departure between these two bodies of literature is whether weak institutions are endogenous to resource wealth, and thus, inevitable in mineral rich states, or exogenous, and thus, can account for the variation in performance across these states. The experience of the Soviet successor states, which consist of both mineral rich and mineral poor countries, provides a unique opportunity to assess the relationship between mineral wealth and institutional capacity, and, in doing so, to consider whether there is in fact a resource curse.

About the speaker:

Pauline Jones Luong is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Brown University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1998 and was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 1998-1999 and 2001-2002. Her primary research interests include: the rise and impact on emerging institutions; identity and conflict; and the political economy of market reform. Her area of focus is the former Soviet Union, particularly the Russian Federation and the newly independent Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan). She has published a number of articles and books. Her books include Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia: Power, Perceptions, and Pacts (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and an edited volume entitled The Transformation of Central Asia: States and Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence (Cornell University Press, 2003)

This talk will discuss the study of a new factor that makes civil war more likely: the inability of political actors to make credible promises to broad segments of society. Lacking this ability, both elected and unelected governments pursue public policies that leave citizens less well-off and more prone to revolt. At the same time, these actors have a reduced ability to build an anti-insurgency capacity in the first place, since they are less able to prevent anti-insurgents from themselves mounting coups. However, while reducing the risk of conflict overall, increasing credibility can, over some range, worsen the effects of natural resources and ethnic fragmentation on civil war. Empirical tests using various measures of political credibility support these conclusions.

About the speaker:

Philip Keeferis a Lead Research Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. Since receiving his PhD in Economics from Washington University at St. Louis in 1991, he has worked continuously on the interaction of institutions, political economy and economic development on issues ranging from the impact of insecure property rights on economic growth to the effect of political credibility on the fiscal and monetary policy choices of governments. His work has appeared in journals ranging from the Quarterly Journal of Economics to the American Review of Political Science.