News & Announcements

Tawakkol Karman, Yemeni activist and recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, served as a Fisher Family Fellow with Harvard’s Future of Diplomacy Project. An outspoken and passionate advocate for human rights, she was critical of the inaction of international institutions and developed nations in response to rights violations in the Middle East.

Dr. Ian Bremmer, expert in political risk and founder of the Eurasia Group, gave a seminar sponsored by the the Future of Diplomacy Project on Thursday, November 9 at the Harvard Kennedy School, titled “Managing Risk in an Unstable World."

Putin and his government seek respect, stability from next U.S. administration, panel says.

Audio recordings from MEI's Spring 2015 Study Group Rethinking the Arab State: the Collapse of Legitimacy in Arab Politics, with Professor Michael C. Hudson.

During the Spring 2015 semester, Prof. Hudson hosted a distinguished group of scholars to re-examine the foundational concepts of legitimacy, the state, civil society, religion, and regional stability in the wake of the Arab Uprisings.

An audio recording from Samer Shehata, Associate Professor of Middle East Studies, University of Oklahoma.

On March 3, 2015 at MEI, Prof. Samer  Shehata assessed the role of the military and pre-2011 regime figures in Egypt's political transition from authoritarianism to apparent democratic opening, and now back to a military-backed authoritarian government, to ask how useful the term 'Deep State' is to understanding Egypt's politics.

In this installment of “Inside the Middle East: Q&A,” Dr. Abbas Al-Mejren, Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar at the Middle East Initiative and Professor of Economics at Kuwait University, discusses economic development plans in Kuwait and Gulf Cooperation Council countries, including poverty alleviation and rationalizing subsidies.

"To understand why the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings have had different outcomes, leave aside the dominant narrative of secularism, Islamism and the political weakness of the youth. [T]he more fundamental and essential role [is that] of the ruling elite, without whom no country can make the transition from authoritarianism to democracy. We must think of those old elites, even in a revolutionary uprising, as active participants who are neither passive nor innocent."

An audio recording from Ambassador Marwan Muasher, Vice President for Studies and Director of the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former Jordanian Ambassador to the United States.

On October 22, 2014 at MEI, Ambassador Muasher looked back over four years of popular uprisings in the Arab World and took stock of the hope for transition to genuine stability, prosperity, and democracy and tools necessary to do the job.

In this installment of “Inside the Middle East: Q&A,” Marwan Muasher, Vice President of Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former Jordanian Ambassador to the United States, discusses pluralism and democracy in the Middle East and his long term vision for political, economic, and cultural transformation in the Arab World.