On March 6–7, 2016, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) held a working group on “Pluralism and Community in the Middle East.” Over the course of two days, a number of distinguished scholars discussed issues related to ethno-linguistic and religious pluralism in the Middle East, identified gaps in the existing literature, and pointed to potential…
Reem Al-Ansari received her LLM from the University of Michigan Law School–Ann Arbor, and earned her Doctorate degree from Georgetown University’s Law Center in Washington D.C., marking her as the youngest Qatari lawyer and doctorate degree holder in the state. In addition to lecturing, Al-Ansari is the Director of the Legal Research and Studies division at Role of Law and Anti-Corruption Center (ROLACC) in Doha, Qatar. Previously, she worked at the World Bank headquarters in the Governance and Anti-corruption (GAC) unit, and is the recipient of two EED awards for education excellence. She is currently working on a book tackling the issue of money laundering and corruption, and tweets under @ReemaAlAnsari.
Shantayanan Devarajan, Chief Economist of the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa Region, delivered a CIRS Focused Discussion on “How the Arab World Can Benefit from Low Oil Prices” on March 24, 2016, in which he proposed that the widespread concern about plummeting oil prices, particularly among rentier states, is not a predicament to…
Uday Chandra is an Assistant Professor of Government. He received his B.A. in economics from Grinnell College and his PhD in political science from Yale University in 2013. He received the 2013 Sardar Patel Award for writing the best dissertation in a US university on any aspect of modern South Asia. Before coming to Doha, he held a prestigious research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Goettingen, Germany. Uday's research lies at the intersection between critical agrarian studies, political anthropology, postcolonial theory, and South Asian studies He is interested in state-society relations, power and resistance, political violence, agrarian change, rural-urban migration, popular religion, and the philosophy of the social sciences. Uday's work has been published in the Law & Society Review, Social Movement Studies, New Political Science, The Journal of Contemporary Asia, Contemporary South Asia, and the Indian Economic & Social History Review. He has coedited volumes and journal special issues on the ethics of self-making in modern South Asia, subaltern politics and the state in contemporary India, caste relations in colonial and postcolonial eastern India, and social movements in rural India today.