Scholar Spotlight: Lisa Anderson

Learn more about one of the leaders in the field of MENA political science

Every week, we spotlight a scholar working on MENA politics and ask them to tell us a little bit about what they’re reading, thinking, and enjoying.

Welcome to the final Abu Aardvark’s MENA Academy post of 2022! It’s been a great ride so far relaunching my blog here on Substack. Since relaunching this summer, I’ve published review essays on 25 books, 25 standalone essays, 2 “hidden curriculum” professional development essays, 2 interviews, and 5 Scholar Spotlights. And we’re only getting started! With The Monkey Cage officially ending its partnership with the Washington Post on December 31 (as of today we aren’t accepting any more submissions) and taking a sabbatical to reorganize and relaunch, I’ll be featuring even more relevant MENA content by smart, well-informed academic colleagues here on the blog. Wishing a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to those who celebrate, and a peaceful and joyous break to all — see you in 2023!

Scholar Spotlight #5: Lisa Anderson

There’s no better way to round out 2022 than with a Scholar Spotlight on one of my favorite academic mentors and colleagues: Lisa Anderson. A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to speak with Lisa Anderson about her concluding essay in the Lynch, Schwedler and Yom book The Political Science of the Middle East. You can listen to that conversation here for the very first time - an Abu Aardvark MENA Academy Exclusive!

It would be difficult to exaggerate the impact that Anderson has had on our field. She was the Dean of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs for a decade, and before that Chair of Columbia’s Political Science Department. Anderson then went on to serve as the Provost and then President of the American University of Cairo, overseeing that exceptional institution through the turbulence of the 2011 revolution. She was President of the Middle East Studies Association, chaired the Board of Directors of the Social Science Research Council, and serves on countless boards. She currently does the book review section for MENA books for Foreign Affairs. Most importantly and prestigiously, of course, she was a founding member of the POMEPS Steering Committee and is now an active member of its Advisory Committee.

Anderson’s institutional positions are only one side of the story. The other is her agenda-setting scholarship. She first made her mark on the discipline with her influential 1986 book on the state in Libya and Tunisia, and the accompanying article in Comparative Politics, “The State in the Middle East and North Africa,” which laid out a research agenda which has profoundly shaped our field (she’s contributed a chapter to a book edited by myself and Steven Heydemann on the topic which we hope will be available soon). She also laid the foundations for the “Arab monarchies” debate which continues to rage in our field with her 1991 Political Science Quarterly article on the topic. “Peace and Democracy in the Middle East,” in the Journal of International Affairs, anticipated and laid out the political economy version of regime security theory which has become dominant in Middle East International Relations.

My personal favorite bits of Lisa Anderson scholarship, though, are her field-surveying essays which are so good at capturing what we as a field have done, critiquing it, and often forever reorienting it. My two favorites: “Searching Where the Light Shines: Studying Democratization in the Middle East,” her 2006 intervention in Annual Review of Political Science which devastatingly captured the costs of chasing disciplinary interests at the expense of the reality of politics on the ground; and “Too Much Information,” her 2012 Perspectives on Politics exploration of the shifting nature of public scholarship and the research opportunities opened up by social media, revolutions, and a new generation of young scholars based in the MENA region. Both are popular fixtures on my Middle East Studies “scope and methods” syllabi.

For the last couple of years, Anderson has been directing the REMENA project (Research Ethics in the Middle East and North Africa), a much needed large scale collaborative project collecting information about the production of knowledge about the MENA region and developing guidance on best practices for ethically informed research.

Read Lisa Anderson’s answers to our weekly MENA Academy Scholar Spotlight questions.

Abu Aardvark: What are you reading right now?

Lisa Anderson: Since I started doing the Middle East capsule reviews for Foreign Affairs several years ago, I’ve enjoyed reading what comes across the desk; the variety of what scholars want to write and policymakers want to read is impressively vast.  Jordan, Egypt, and the Gulf seem to be the site of a lot of interesting work these days; Jose Ciro Martinez and Jillian Schwedler on Jordan, Amr Adly on Egypt, Noora Lori and Calvert Jones on the Gulf have all had interesting things to say about twenty-first century politics in the region. Marc Owens Jones wins the best chapter title, though, in his Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: “You are being lied to by people who don’t even exist.”  A wonderful cautionary tale about digital research and reporting everywhere.

For myself, I’m deep into work on the research enterprise in the region for a project to develop guidelines for the conduct of responsible, ethical, and constructive social inquiry in the Middle East and North Africa. (see https://www.mei.columbia.edu/remena-about)  It’s been heartening to see how important debates about research ethics are becoming, thanks to the work of colleagues like Sarah Parkinson, Lisa Wedeen, Janine Clark and others but also a bit dismaying to realize just how little we know about the research enterprise in the region:  who is doing research, where is it published, who is funding it and, of course, who is the audience?  Clearly there is more work to be done.

 
What’s your favorite thing you’ve ever written? (why?)

I’ve never been particularly clever about the outlets where I publish so two of my favorite pieces are among the most obscure.  I really like "The Tripoli Republic, 1918-1922," (in E. G. H. Joffe and K. S. MacLachlan, eds., The Economic and Social Development of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Libya London: MENAS Press, Ltd. 1982) and “A Last Resort, an Expedient and an Experiment: Statehood and Sovereignty in Libya,” in the (now defunct!)  Journal of Libyan Studies, 2:2 Winter 2001.  Both of these are about critical junctures in the Middle East and North Africa—the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars—and argue that the Libyan experience reveals themes that would shape the region as a whole. The Tripoli Republic disappears in the Ottoman collapse, Turkish self-involvement and Italian triumphalism of the post-war settlements; the independent Kingdom of Libya appears out of the Italian defeat, British self-interest and American triumphalism in another moment of apparent peace-making.  Neither polity was what it’s supporters claimed it to be but both had outsized impacts on the lives of the people who lived with them and, indeed, on the lives of their descendants today.

That conviction that we should “bring history back in” to our discussion of politics did get some attention in “Demystifying the Arab Spring” (not my title!), Foreign Affairs, May/June 2011, in which I made the case that the outcomes of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya would differ in predictable ways, reflecting their very different historical trajectories over the previous century—and it wasn’t far off! 

What are you currently working on?

I have a small project that is a reflection on and extension of my 1987 Comparative Politics article, “The State in the Middle East and North Africa.”  While I think that article accurately captured the moment, the region has moved on and I don’t think the essay conveys the character of regional politics today.  Decades of emphasis on regime stability and then on neo-liberal markets as putative engines of peace and prosperity have reversed much of the state-building of the mid-twentieth century and reconfigured politics in ways no-one—at least, not I—could have anticipated.  Regime self-preservation animated sectarianism and economic privatization fueled inequality in ways that have transcended state boundaries and weakened state institutions. We need to better understand those dynamics and in puzzling over these developments, I’d like to encourage research in that direction.  

What’s your dream research project (and why haven't you done it yet)?

Obviously, I should write a memoir of life running the American University in Cairo during the 2011 uprising and its aftermath—I have lots of amusing, amazing, sad and hilarious stories from that extraordinary experience.  But since most of what I write is to satisfy my own curiosity, I am slow to get to what might pique other people’s interest.  So, this is really someone else’s dream project but I hope to get to it eventually.

What scholar(s) besides yourself do you think is currently doing the most interesting work on MENA politics?

Here I want to credit not the scholars themselves but the institutional builders without whom our scholarly colleagues would not be doing nearly as much interesting research as they are.  This small but virtuous circle includes you, as the impresario of POMEPS, but also Seteney Shami of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, Ahmed Morsy of the Arab Political Science Network, Azmi Bishara at the Doha Institute, Hillary Wiesner of the Carnegie Corporation, Nadim Houry of the Arab Reform Initiative, Marwan M. Kraidy at Northwestern in Qatar, Bassma Kodmani, lately, and now Maha Yahya, of the Carnegie Center in Beirut, David Wheeler, founding editor of Al-Fanar Media, Rabab El-Mahdi of Alternative Policy Solutions in Cairo, and many, many others.   Creating and sustaining an increasingly robust landscape for research in the face of often skeptical (or demanding) governments and feeble (or demanding) funders is some of the most interesting and important work anyone could be doing on MENA politics.   

What’s one resource / opportunity that you wish more MENA politics scholars knew about and took advantage of?

Without a doubt, the most underutilized resource for scholars today is mobility.  Having started my own research career at a time when you had to make an appointment at the post office to place an international phone call a week later, the ease of communication today is staggering. And in some ways, that has facilitated scholarly exchange. But it is not a substitute for actually spending time somewhere else. Wherever you are located, now that COVID is receding into a background condition of ordinary life, you should be planning to spend six months somewhere else.  Scholars based in the Middle East and North Africa should be searching out visiting appointments in Europe and North America, Europeans and North Americans should be looking for opportunities to affiliate with research institutes, universities or development agencies in the region—and to stay for more than a few weeks.  Thanks to the magic of digital technologies, everyone will be able to be in touch with their faculty supervisors, students and colleagues, indeed, to serve on committees and task forces back home—no excuses! (Ok, small children at home are an excuse—but start planning: those kids will be out of the house before you know it!)

What's your current favorite bit of MENA culture?

I’ve enjoyed little recently as much as the performance of Morocco in the World Cup.  Not only were they a wonderful team to watch but their successive victories spurred fascinating political conversations and endlessly creative on-line memes that testified to the intelligence, humor and artistry of my fellow human beings. A nice change of pace…

Thank you, and have a great holiday season!