Past Event
Seminar

Democracy Promotion and the Limits of Western Donor Assistance to Civil Society

Harvard Faculty, Fellows, Staff, and Students

The Dubai Initiative will host a talk with Manal Jamal on Monday, April 28th in the Kennedy School's Fainsod Room.

Democracy Promotion and the Limits of Western Donor Assistance to Civil Society

About

The Dubai Initiative will host a talk with Manal Jamal on Monday, April 28th in the Kennedy School's Fainsod Room.

Manal A. Jamal is a Visiting Scholar with the Dubai Initiative at the Belfer Center, and a Research Fellow at the Dubai School of Government. In 2006, she received her PhD in Political Science from McGill University, specializing in the comparative politics of developing areas. She also holds a B.A. and M.A. in International Relations from the University of California, Davis and San Francisco State University respectively. Her research interests include democratization, war-to-peace transitions, and politics of the Middle East, including the Arab-Israeli conflict. During the 2006 and 2007 academic year, she was a Sultan Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. She previously worked as a journalist and researcher in the Palestinian territories, and she has taught at McGill University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Mills College. In the fall of 2008, she will begin a tenure track position at James Madison University.

This seminar is based on Dr. Jamal's book manuscript which is currently under preparation "Democracy Promotion in Troubled Times: the Limits of Western Donor Assistance to Civil Society." Drawing from fieldwork in the Palestinian territories and El Salvador for which the author was a co-winner of the best fieldwork award of the Comparative Democratization section of the American Political Science Association, she demonstrates how political settlements ultimately shape the impact of donor assistance on civil society. The presentation will provide important insights about democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East today.