A seminar with Melani Cammett, Associate Professor of Political Science, Brown University. This event is part of the fall 2013 seminar series led by MEI Visiting Scholar Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: "The Politics and Economics of Transitions in the Middle East." For more information about this series, click here.
We encourage you to be familiar with Development and Underdevelopment in the Middle East and North Africa and Is There an 'Islamist Political Advantage'? in advance of the talk.
About Melani Cammett:
Melani Cammett is Associate Professor of Political Science, the Dupee Faculty Fellow at the Watson Institute, and a faculty associate at the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. She specializes in the political economy of development and the Middle East and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on comparative politics, development, and Middle East politics. Cammett's first book, Globalization and Business Politics in North Africa: A Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2007) examines how global economic integration affects state-business relations and industrial development, focusing on Morocco and Tunisia. Her second book, Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon (Cornell University Press, 2014), explores how sectarian organizations allocate social welfare goods. The book is based on extensive research in Lebanon with additional case studies of organizations in Iraq and India. An article based on this research won the 2011 Alexander L. George Award of the Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research Section of the American Political Science Association.
Cammett's co-edited book, The Politics of Non-State Social Welfare in the Global South (Cornell University Press, 2014), examines the political consequences of non-state welfare provision n diverse regions. Her current research focuses on public and social goods provision by Islamists and other types of public and private actors in several Middle Eastern countries. With the support of the Mellon Foundation, she will spend the 2013-2014 academic year at the Harvard School of Public Health to work on this project. Cammett has published articles in Comparative Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, the International Journal for Equity in Health, Studies in Comparative International Development, World Development, World Politics, and other scholarly journals. Cammett holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley and a M.A. from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and has consulted for various development policy organizations.
