BIOGRAPHY OF VALI NASR

Vali Nasr is Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, Senior Advisor at Kissinger Associates, Senior Fellow at Foreign Policy at Brookings Institution, and a columnist at Bloomberg View. He served as Senior Advisor to U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke between 2009 and 2011. He has previously served as Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and Senior Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

He is a specialist on political and social developments in the Muslim world and is the author of Forces of Fortune: The Rise of a New Middle Class and How it Will Change Our World (Free Press, 2009); The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future (W.W. Norton, 2006); and Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2006); as well as a number of other books and numerous articles in academic journals and encyclopedias.

He has advised senior American policy makers, world leaders, and businesses including the President, Secretary of State, senior members of the Congress, and presidential campaigns, and has written for New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, Newsweek, Time, Christian Science Monitor, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, and has provided frequent expert commentary to CNN, BBC, National Public Radio, Newshour, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and has been a guest on the Charlie Rose Show and Meet the Press, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, Real Time with Bill Maher, GPS with Fareed Zakaria, and This Week with Christiane Amanpour.

He is a member of Board of Trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and National Democratic Institute; and has been the recipient of grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. He is a Carnegie Scholar for 2006.

He received his BA from Tufts University in International Relations summa cum laude and was initiated into Phi Beta Kappa in 1983. He earned his masters from the Fletcher School of Law in and Diplomacy in international economics and Middle East studies in 1984, and his PhD from MIT in political science in 1991.

S.T. LEE LECTURE

The S.T. Lee Lecture was established by Seng Tee Lee, a businessman and philanthropist located in Singapore, with the dual objectives of raising public understanding of the complex policy issues facing the global community today and increasing public support for informed international cooperation.  The S.T. Lee Distinguished Lecturer is chosen for his or her international reputation as a leader in international political, economic, social and health issues, and strategic policy-making concerns.

Previous S.T. Lee Lecturers have included John Prendergast, author and human rights activist, the Honorable Robert Hormats, Under Secretary of State for Economic, Energy, and Agricultural Affairs, the Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk, Joseph F. Nye, the Dean emeritus and Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Dr. Paul Farmer, Professor of Medicine and Medical Anthropology, Harvard University and Medical Director of the Clinique Bon Sauveur in Cange, Hait.

Avishai Margalit is one of the foremost thinkers and commentators on the contemporary human condition, the moral issues of our time, and current problems facing Western societies. In addition to his influence as a philosopher, he is highly regarded for his profound and cogent observations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the broader struggle between Islam and the West. As the author of Idolatry (with Moshe Halbertal), The Decent Society, Views in Review: Politics and Culture in the State of the Jews, The Ethics of Memory, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (with Ian Buruma), and On Compromise and Rotten Compromises , Margalit has transformed philosophical perspectives on a range of political and societal issues.

For additional information, please visit the Stanford Ethics and War series website.

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.

Indonesia has undergone democratization since 1998. Islamic political parties have re-emerged, but they have failed to gain significant support. National politics in Indonesia today are mainly secular. Yet religious values are held in high regard, and religious sentiments are expressed in books, films, fashions, and television programs, among other media. Why has this enthusiasm for religion not yielded a dominant role for Islamism as a political force? The popularity of Islamic political parties has actually declined. Why? What factors have enabled non-religious parties to maintain political prominence while, at the same time, society has become more pious?

Anies Baswedan, currently president of Paramadina University in Jakarta, is a leading intellectual figure in Indonesia. In 2008, the editors of Foreign Policy named him one of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals. As an advisor to the Indonesian government, he is a leading proponent of democracy and transparency in Indonesia, a creative thinker about Islam and democracy, as well as a charismatic leader in the educational field. Anies Baswedan will be on campus in May 2011 through the International Visitors Program sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He was nominated by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

Co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the Southeast Asia Forum, and the Stanford Humanities Center