A nation must think before it acts.
The Second Arab Revolution
In this talk, Michael Doran will analyze the current turmoil in the Middle East against the background of Arab history. He will discuss the prospects for stability and democracy, and the likely impact of events on American primacy in the Middle East.
An expert on the international politics of the Middle East, Michael Doran has worked in both academia and government. His research interests include US policy toward the Middle East, radical Islam, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is particularly interested in inter-Arab relations, believing that contests for power and authority between Arabs and Muslims have an unrecognized influence, both over relations between the Middle East and the West, and over the Arab- Israeli conflict. Thus his book, Pan-Arabism before Nasser, interprets the 1948 Arab-Israeli war as an inter- Arab conflict. And one of his articles, “Somebody Else’s Civil War” (Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb 2002), was the first piece after 9/11 to interpret al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington as an expression of a war within Islam — a thesis that is now common wisdom. In academia, Doran has held appointments at Princeton University and the University of Central Florida. In government he has served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and as a Senior Director at the National Security Council. His principal teaching focus at Wagner is introducing students, both graduates and undergraduates, to relations between the United States and the Middle East. Dr. Doran received his MA and Ph.D. in History from Princeton University.