Dr. Joshua Teitelbaum is a Senior Research Fellow at Tel Aviv University's Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, where he studies the politics and history of Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries, as well as Palestinian issues. He is the author of two acclaimed books: Holier Than Thou: Saudi Arabia's Islamic Opposition (Washington Institute for Near East Policy), and The Rise and Fall of the Hashemite Kingdom of Arabia (New York University Press), a study of the early modern history of Saudi Arabia. He has published numerous scholarly articles on the modern Middle East and his work has also appeared in The New Republic and The Jerusalem Report. He has been a visiting professor in Cornell University's Department of Near Eastern Studies and at the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, and a Visiting Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is currently Schusterman Visiting Associate Professor at CDDRL.

Dr. Teitelbaum is an Associate of the Proteus Management Group, US Army War College Center for Strategic Leadership, under the sponsorship of the Office of the Director, National Intelligence.

Dr. Teitelbaum is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. He received his B.A. in Near Eastern Studies at UCLA and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University.

Political Science has very few "accepted truths." One of the most prominent is the claim that countries endowed with natural resources, particularly mineral wealth, are doomed to suffer from poor economic performance, unbalanced growth, weak states, and authoritarian regimes - often referred to as the "resource curse." This claim, however, is not without its critics. In recent years, a few scholars have contended that the resource curse is essentially a myth. Rather, the main culprit is the absence of viable political, economic, and social institutions, such as secure property rights and an effective bureaucracy. Yet, their emphasis on the importance of strong institutions is entirely consistent with the conventional wisdom that they are challenging. The main point of departure between these two bodies of literature is whether weak institutions are endogenous to resource wealth, and thus, inevitable in mineral rich states, or exogenous, and thus, can account for the variation in performance across these states. The experience of the Soviet successor states, which consist of both mineral rich and mineral poor countries, provides a unique opportunity to assess the relationship between mineral wealth and institutional capacity, and, in doing so, to consider whether there is in fact a resource curse.

About the speaker:

Pauline Jones Luong is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Brown University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1998 and was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 1998-1999 and 2001-2002. Her primary research interests include: the rise and impact on emerging institutions; identity and conflict; and the political economy of market reform. Her area of focus is the former Soviet Union, particularly the Russian Federation and the newly independent Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan). She has published a number of articles and books. Her books include Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia: Power, Perceptions, and Pacts (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and an edited volume entitled The Transformation of Central Asia: States and Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence (Cornell University Press, 2003)

The speaker, Macartan Humphreys, is an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University and a visiting professor at CISAC. He is a research scholar at the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at the Earth Institute at Columbia and a member of the Millennium Development goals project poverty task force, where he works on conflict and development issues. Overall his research is on African political economy and formal political theory. His dissertation on the politics of factions developed game theoretic models of conflict and cooperation between internally divided groups. More recent research focuses on rebellions in West Africa, where he has undertaken field research in the Casamance, Mali, and Sierra Leone. Ongoing research now includes experimental work on ethnic politics, econometric work on natural resource conflicts, game theoretic work on ethnic politics and large N survey work of ex-combatants in Sierra Leone. Humphreys' work is motivated by concerns over the linkages between politics, conflict and human development. He received his PhD in government from Harvard in 2003 and his MPhil in economics from Oxford in 2000.

The respondent, David Patel, is a 2006-2007 predoctoral fellow at CDDRL (fall quarter) and CISAC (winter and spring quarters). He is completing a dissertation looking at questions of religious organization and collective action in the Middle East, with a theoretical focus on the relationship of organization and information in particular. Empirically, his study looks at Islamic institutions and their role in political action in a wide range of settings including 7th century garrison cities of the early Islamic empire, through the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Patel has spent a great deal of time in the Middle East over the last several years, including extended visits to Yemen, Morocco, Jordan, and Iraq, where he spent seven months in Basra conducting research beginning in the fall of 2003. He works with David Laitin, Jim Fearon, and Avner Greif at Stanford. In fall 2007 he will join the faculty at Cornell University as an assistant professor of political science.

Paul Arthur is professor of politics and course director of the graduate program in peace and conflict studies at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. He has been a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and a consultant to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict and the United Nations Research Institute on Social Development.

He has published widely on the Northern Ireland conflict. He wrote Special Relationships: Britain, Ireland, and the Northern Ireland Problem and Memory, Forgiveness, and Conflict: Trust-building in Northern Ireland. His latest work focuses on what he calls the "consequences of peace" in post-conflict truth and reconciliation processes.

Professor Arthur has lectured widely in the United States and Europe. He is the Irish Fulbright in residence at Stanford this winter-spring.

Sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, the Western Institute of Irish Studies, and the Irish Studies Foundation.