At the dawn of the twenty first century the post-colonial Arab and non-Arab societies of the Muslim Middle East have experienced continuous revolutions and military interventions, domestic and foreign, but without any positive effect on their governance. This presentation will explore the role of the power elites’ institutional choices and elements of the political cycle responsible for the creation of a vicious circle of oppression, stagnation and periodic violence and instability in the region.

Nazif Shahrani is Professor of Anthropology, Central Asia and Middle Eastern Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has also served as Chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Culture (2007-2011) and Director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Program at Indiana University. Professor Shahrani has conducted extensive field research in the Middle East, Egypt in particular, Afghanistan and Central Asia. He has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Middle Eastern and Central Asian history and politics. His current research focuses on the narratives of state-society relations and governance in multi-ethnic post-colonial failing nation states. He has published very widely, and, in addition to his intellectual focus on the Arab world, he is presently completing a book entitled State-Society Dynamics, Crisis of Legitimacy and Governance in Post-Taliban Afghanistan.