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Today (Wednesday), Duke University economist Timur Kuran and Dartmouth political scientist Dirk Vandewalle debate the question, “What killed Middle East liberalism?” They will consider the role of oil, Islamic law, and more in the failure of the Arab Spring, democratic breakdown in Turkey, and the authoritarianism of the Persian Gulf states.

 

The event takes place in the Filene Auditorium in the Moore Psychology Building at 4:30 PM.

 

This event is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Political Economy Project Leadership Council, a student organization.

 

Timur Kuran is Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. His research focuses on (1) social change, including the evolution of preferences and institutions, and (2) the economic and political history and modernization of the Middle East. His current projects include a study of the role that the Middle East's traditional institutions played in its poor political performance, as measured by democratization and human liberties. Among his publications are Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Harvard University Press); Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism (Princeton University Press); The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton University Press); and a tri-lingual edited work that consists of ten volumes, Socio-Economic Life in Seventeenth-century Istanbul: Glimpses from Court Records (Is Bank Publications). After graduating from Robert Academy in Istanbul in 1973, Kuran went on to study economics at Princeton University (AB 1977) and Stanford University (PhD 1982). Between 1982 and 2007 he taught at the University of Southern California. He was also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the John Olin Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, and a visiting professor of economics at Stanford University. He currently directs the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS); is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Economic Association; edits a book series for Cambridge University Press, serves on numerous editorial boards; and is a member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences.
He has served on the World Economic Forum's Arab World Council.

 

Diederick "Dirk" Vandewalle is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on Libya, political economy, Middle East politics, commodity booms, institutional development, and economic reform in developing countries, and state-building and regime change in the Middle East and North Africa. He is the author of A History of Modern Libya (Cambridge University Press) and of Libya Since Independence: Oil and State-Building (Cornell University Press) and has written widely on the Arab Spring. He received his B.A. from Southwest Minnesota State University and his PhD from Columbia University.