"Charismatic Leaders and Nation Building: Ataturk's role in the Formation of Turkish Identity" Lydia Assouad, Paris School of Economics

About

How much power does a charismatic leader have on its citizens? Lydia Assouad, Ph.D. Candidate at the Paris School of Economics and a Research Fellow at the World Inequality Lab addresses this question in her latest research by studying the role of Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk," the founder of modern Turkey, and what effect he had in spreading a new national Turkish identity.

Moderated by MEI Faculty Director Tarek Masoud, Sultan Qaboos Bin Said of Oman Professor of International Relations.

About the Speaker

Lydia Assouad is a PhD Candidate at the Paris School of Economics and a Research Fellow at the World Inequality Lab. She was also the El-Erian fellow at the Malcom H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center for the year 2019–2020. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political economy, economic history, and development economics, with a focus on the Middle East. A first strand of her research focuses on the dynamics of economic inequality in the region. She is the author of the articles “Rethinking the Lebanese Economic Miracle: the Extreme Concentration of Income and Wealth in Lebanon” and “Measuring Inequality in the Middle East 1990–2016: The World’s Most Unequal Region?” with Facundo Alvaredo and Thomas Piketty. 

Her second agenda focuses on understanding the roots of state capacity in the region. She is currently working on the economic and political effects of the Turkish nation-building policies implemented in the 1920s. She specifically wants to understand the relative efficiency of the different tools used by the state to spread a common identity, including among other, the effect of the local official visits made by Mustafa Kemal.

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