Professional Affiliation

Professor, Smith College

Expert Bio

In addition to holding the Janet Wright Ketcham 1953 Chair in Middle East Studies, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government, Heydemann is a nonresident senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institution. Heydemann is a political scientist who specializes in the comparative politics and political economy of the Middle East. His interests include authoritarian governance, economic development, social policy, political and economic reform, and civil society. In addition, Heydemann consults widely with the U.S. government, NGOs, and European governments on issues relating to the Middle East, including Syria policy and the status of the Syrian conflict. Author or editor of numerous books, articles, policy papers, and op eds, he has appeared as a Syria expert on leading media outlets, including the BBC, al-Arabiyya, al-Jazeera, the New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy Journal and PBS.

Expertise

• Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding
• Democracy
• Economics and Globalization
• Global Governance
• Governance
• International Development
• Society and Culture

Wilson Center Project

Trajectories of Stateness in the Arab World

Project Summary

The fellowship will support research and writing toward a book that will address two principal questions. First, why have states in the Middle East proven so resistant to interventions intended to strengthen institutions, improve governance, and sustain social development? Second, how can we account for the persistence and resilience of ruling regimes that consistently produce suboptimal social and economic outcomes? The Middle East is a rich context in which to explore such questions. It is routinely cast as a region with states that are weak or fragile, where “strong societies” frustrate the developmental aspirations of rulers. This project challenges such perspectives. It will explore and account for patterns of asymmetric stateness: states with varied institutional configurations and capacities that reflect how the rulers who have overseen state building projects cultivate state capacity in some areas but neglect it in others as they navigate often fraught relationships with the societies they govern.

Major Publications

• Steven Heydemann and Marc Lynch, eds., Making Sense of the Arab State. University of Michigan Press, 2024,
• “Rethinking Social Contracts in the MENA Region: Economic Governance, Contingent Citizenship, and State-Society Relations After the Arab Uprisings.” World Development, 2020.
• “Civil War, Economic Governance, and State Reconstruction in the Arab Middle East.” Daedalus 2018.