What Do Ordinary Citizens Want: Democracy, Political Islam, or Democracy and Political Islam?

Thursday, December 8, 2011
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
(Pacific)
CISAC Conference Room
Speaker: 
  • Mark Tessler

Mark Tessler is Samuel J. Eldersveld Collegiate Professor of Political Science. He is also Vice Provost for International Affairs.   Professor Tessler specializes in Comparative Politics and Middle East Studies. He has studied and/or conducted field research in Tunisia, Israel, Morocco, Egypt, and Palestine (West Bank and Gaza).  He is one of the very few American scholars to have attended university and lived for extended periods in both the Arab world and Israel.  He has also spent several years teaching and consulting in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Professor Tessler also co-directs the Arab Barometer Survey project.  The first wave of Arab Barometer surveys, carried out in eight Arab countries and completed in 2009, was named the best new data set in comparative politics by the American Political Science Association in 2010.  The second wave of Arab Barometer surveys is currently under way.

Professor Tessler has also conducted research and written extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is the author of A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which won national honors and was named a “Notable Book of 1994” by The New York Times. An updated and expanded edition of this book was published in 2009.

Professor Tessler is General Editor of the Indiana University Press series in Middle East Studies. He is also on the editorial board of Public Opinion Quarterly and a number of other scholarly journals. He served from 1995 to 2004 as president of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, which maintains research facilities in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco; is a past president of the Association for Israel Studies; and was a founding member of the Palestinian-American Research Center.