Foreign Policy Research Institute A Nation Must Think Before it Acts The Arab Spring and the Peace Process

The Arab Spring and the Peace Process

  • February 22, 2012

The uprisings that swept the Middle East over the past year have not only yielded regime change, civil unrest, and uncertainty, but have also caused the U.S. policy community to completely reconsider its agenda and its alliances in the region. Though unable to predict the onset of these tumultuous events, a serious attempt is being made in Washington to understand the wave of political transitions occurring throughout the Middle East since December 2010 as well as issues of authoritarianism, democratic reform, and the resurgence of political Islamism that the region is contending with. This talk will examine these issues and address their implications for U.S. foreign policy in what some are calling, “The New Middle East.”

Daniel Brumberg is Senior Adviser to the Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention, where he focuses on issues of democratization and political reform in the Middle East and wider Islamic world. He is also an associate professor at Georgetown University and a former senior associate in the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy and Rule of Law Project (2003-04). Previously, he was a Jennings Randolph senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where he pursued a study of power sharing in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. With a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, he is currently working on a comparative study of power-sharing experiments in Algeria, Kuwait and Indonesia. A member of the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy and the advisory board of the International Forum on Democratic Studies, he is also chairman of the nonprofit Foundation on Democratization and Political Change in the Middle East. He has worked closely with a number of nongovernmental organizations in the Arab world, including the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

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Middle East Program