News & Announcements

Dorothy Zinberg, Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and a founding member of the Belfer Center, was awarded the prestigious Harvard Signet Medal on Saturday, April 21.

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.

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.

During a candid conversation at the Harvard Kennedy School, prominent women leaders in the science and media industries recently talked about their efforts to remedy this. They ignited a fervent discussion and identified achievable goals that both professional women and their male and female bosses can work toward. The event, “Sexism, Science, and Science Writing: Promoting Women Leaders in the Lab and the Newsroom,” drew a standing-room-only crowd of more than 100 women and men of all ages—from a female high school student to senior astrophysicists and science writers.

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."