[LCM Events] REMINDER: MIT Emile Bustani Seminars on April 1 and 15

[Heidi Erickson]

Please join us for the 2014 Spring Semester of the MIT Emile Bustani Middle East Seminar Series.

The first lecture will take place on Tuesday, April 1, 2014. Hugh Roberts, Edward Keller Professor of North American and Middle Eastern History at Tufts University, will discuss the Algerian presidential election.

The second session will take place on Tuesday, April 15, 2014. Ali Banuazizi, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program in Islamic Civilization and Societies at Boston College, will discuss the nuclear agreement with Iran and it’s ramifications for the regional politics with the Middle East.

The seminars are free and open to the public thanks to the generosity of the family of the late Emile Bustani, the MIT Center for International Studies and the MIT Technology and Culture Forum. Additional details follow.

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Bustani Middle East Seminar
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
4:30-6pm | MIT Building E51, Room 057 (70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge)

The Ides of April: the presidential succession crisis and the dilemmas of the Algerian oligarchy
Hugh Roberts
Edward Keller Professor of North African and Middle Eastern History
Tufts University

Dr. Hugh Roberts is the Edward Keller Professor of North African and Middle Eastern History at Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, USA and a specialist on North African history and politics. He took up his post at Tufts in January 2012. Between 1976 and 1997 he lectured in the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia, the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and the Department of History at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. From 1997 to 2002 he was a Senior Research Fellow of the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has also worked outside academia, as an independent scholar and consultant on North African affairs and as Director of the International Crisis Group’s North Africa Project, based in Cairo, from 2002 to 2007 and again from February to July 2011. His book, The Battlefield: Algeria 1988-2002. Studies in a broken polity, was published by Verso in 2003. His new books, Berber Government: the Kabyle polity in pre-colonial Algeria, and Algérie-Kabylie: Études et interventions de Hugh Roberts (in French) are to be published in 2014.

Abstract
The Algerian presidential election now scheduled for April 17 is surrounded with uncertainty. It remains to be seen whether President Bouteflika will seek a fourth term or not. If he does, it is doubtful that he will manage to serve out the full five years. If not, it is for now quite unclear who his successor will be. This uncertainty is linked to the question of whether the army commanders will be able to act as the substantive electoral college, as they have always done in the past, or whether there will be, for the first time, a genuinely contested election in which Algerian voters constitute an effective electorate. This in turn is linked to the question of whether Algeria will at last break with the Egyptian model it has broadly followed since 1962, by having a civilian president who has no military or revolutionary past with which to claim entitlement to the highest political office and, if so, whether the presidency will retain its considerable prerogatives in these circumstances. What is certain, however, is that Algeria has entered a very tense period, since the presidential succession – whether consummated in April or simply postponed till Bouteflika’s definitive exit at some later point – is already dominating the horizon and determining the strategies of all Algeria’s political actors. This is because it is a key part, but only one part, of a much wider leadership succession, which is affecting the regular army, the intelligence services and several of the main political parties as well as the presidency. How the Algerian oligarchy as a whole will agree to try – or try to agree - to manage this general succession in its collective leadership is now at issue in current maneuvers. At stake in the medium and longer term are its own cohesion and aptitude for coherent rule, its capacity to tap new sources of legitimacy and also, in that connection, its willingness and ability to conceive and introduce reforms in the state-society relationship.



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Bustani Middle East Seminar
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
4:30-6pm | MIT Building E51, Room 057 (70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge)

The Nuclear Agreement with Iran and Its Ramifications for the Regional Politics of the Middle East
Ali Banuazizi
Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program in Islamic Civilization and Societies
Boston College


After receiving his Ph. D. from Yale University in 1968, Ali Banuazizi taught at Yale and the University of Southern California before joining the Boston College Faculty in 1971. Since then, he has held visiting appointments and fellowships at the University of Tehran, Princeton, Harvard, and Oxford University, and MIT. He served as the founding editor of the journal of Iranian Studies, from 1968 to 1982. He is a past President of the International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS) and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).

Ali Banuazizi is the author of numerous articles on society, culture, and politics in Iran and the Middle East, and the coauthor (with A. Ashraf) of Social Classes, the State and Revolution in Iran (2008, in Persian) and coeditor (with Myron Weiner) of three books on politics, religion and society in Southwest and Central Asia. He is currently associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World.

Abstract
Ever since the unexpected victory of Hassan Rouhani in last June’s Iranian presidential election, Iran has pursued two broad objectives in its foreign policy: to seek a resolution of its decade-long nuclear disputes with the world powers and to forge better relations with its neighbors in the Persian Gulf and the broader Middle East.  The substantial progress that has been made in the nuclear negotiations has raised hopes among many observers that reaching a comprehensive nuclear agreement between Iran and the five  permanent members of the U. N. Security Council plus Germany later this year would ease the way toward the resolution of other regional conflicts that currently plague the Middle East, to a gradual rapprochement between the U. S. and Iran, and, potentially, to a realignment of international relations within the MENA region. This presumed linkage between a successful diplomatic resolution of the nuclear disputes and a fundamental shift in Iran’s foreign policy and security alignments ignores a number of crucial differences in the incentives, strategic calculations, and ideological maxims that  have helped shape Iran’s stance in these two policy arenas. While the new president’s decision, with the support of the supreme leader, to enter into serious negotiations over the country’s nuclear program was prompted mainly by the crippling impact of international sanctions on the Iranian economy, Iran’s broader security strategy and direct or indirect involvements in the various conflicts in the region—including those in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf—and a willingness to normalize its relations with the U. S. —are subject to a somewhat different set of domestic, regional, and international factors. These include an unremitting fear of and hostility toward Western “cultural assault” on the part of the ruling clerics, a basic  distrust of Western motives and intentions, a long-standing ambition to be recognized as a regional superpower and a principal voice in the Islamic world, the rising sectarian Shi’i-Sunni conflicts in the Middle East, and the countervailing interests of rival powers in the region and their influential lobbies in the West, and the lingering preference for  “regime change” over diplomacy and rapprochement by a significant part of the American political establishment. Given such domestic, regional, and international impediments and conflicting interests, we may well cherish the prospects of a successful nuclear accord, but perhaps should not be too sanguine in our expectations that such an accord would lead to a fundamental change in Iran’s policies toward and involvements in some of the region’s current conflicts—especially those in which the U. S. and its traditional allies are directly involved.


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For questions, please contact hae at mit.edu<mailto:hae at mit.edu>
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