Retired Ambassador Barbara Bodine to Moderate “The Roots of the Middle East Crisis”
Join the Bush School of Government & Public Service for an engaging panel discussion on the Roots of the Middle East Crisis on Tuesday, May 10, 2022 at noon Eastern time/11 am Central. The discussion will be held in person at the Bush School DC, located at 1620 L Street N.W., Washington, D.C. Participants many also join via Zoom.
Moderated by retired Ambassador to the Republic of Yemen, Barbara Bodine, the panel features Dr. F. Gregory Gause, III, head of the Bush School Department of International Affairs; Dr. Lisa Anderson, Special Lecturer and James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations Emerita at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs; Marc Lynch, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs as well as the Director, Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs; and Professor Vali Nassr, the Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center.
About the panelists:
F. Gregory Gause, III
Dr. F. Gregory Gause, III, joined the Bush School in 2014 as the head of the Department of International Affairs and holds the John H. Lindsey ’44 Chair. He was previously at the University of Vermont, where he was professor of political science from 1995 to 2014 and, from 2010 to 2013, chair of its Department of Political Science. He served as director of the University’s Middle East Studies Program from 1998 to 2008. He was a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Doha Center from 2012-2015. Dr. Gause received his PhD in political science from Harvard University (1987) and studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo (1982-83) and at Middlebury College (1984).
Dr. Gause has focused his research on the international politics of the Middle East, with a particular interest in the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. He has published three books, the most recent of which is The International Relations of the Persian Gulf (Cambridge University Press, 2010). His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Security Studies, Middle East Journal, and The National Interest, as well as in other journals and edited volumes. He has testified on Persian Gulf issues before the Committee on International Relations of the US House of Representatives and the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Prior to his tenure at the University of Vermont, Dr. Gause served on the faculty at Columbia University (1987-1995) and was Fellow for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (1993-94). He was the Kuwait Foundation visiting professor of international affairs at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (2009-10), and a Fulbright scholar at the American University in Kuwait (spring 2009). In spring 2010, he was a research fellow at the King Faisal Center for Islamic Studies and Research in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
He recently authored an article in Foreign Affairs, The Price of Order: Settling for Less in the Middle East.
Lisa Anderson
Lisa Anderson is a Special Lecturer and James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations Emerita at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. Dr. Anderson served as President of the American University in Cairo for five years, from 2011-2016. Prior to her appointment as President, she was the University’s provost, a position she had assumed in 2008. She is Dean Emerita of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, where she led the school from 1997-2007. She was on the faculty of Columbia since 1986; prior to her appointment as Dean, she served as Chair of the Political Science Department and Director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute. She has also taught at Princeton and Harvard Universities.
Dr. Anderson’s scholarly research has included work on state formation in the Middle East and North Africa; on regime change and democratization in developing countries; and on social science, academic research and public policy both in the United States and around the world. Among her books are The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830-1980 (1986) and Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-first Century (2003); she has also published numerous scholarly articles.
Dr. Anderson is a trustee of the Aga Khan University, Tufts University and the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. She is a member emerita of the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch, served as elected President of the Middle East Studies Association, and as Chair of the Board of the Social Science Research Council. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations, she has received honorary degrees from Monmouth University and the American University in Paris.
Dr. Anderson is the author of an essay in the Cairo Review, Shifting Patterns of Arab Politics.
Marc Lynch
Marc Lynch is a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs as well as the Director, Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. Professor Lynch received his B.A. in Political Science from Duke University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University. He teaches courses on Middle Eastern politics and international relations. He is the director of the Project on Middle East Political Science, a contributing editor for The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage political science page, editor of the Columbia University Press series Columbia Studies on Middle East Politics, and a nonresident senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Professor Lynch authored the Foreign Affairs article, The Arab Uprising Never Ended: The Enduring struggle to Remake the Middle East.
Vali R. Nasr
Vali Nasr is the Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center. He served as the eighth Dean of Johns Hopkins SAIS between 2012 and 2019 and served as Senior Advisor to U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke between 2009 and 2011.
Nasr is the author of The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat; Forces of Fortune: The Rise of a New Middle Class and How it Will Change Our World; The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future; Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty; Islamic Leviathan, Islam and the Making of State Power; Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism; and Vanguard of Islamic Revolution: Jama’at-i Islami of Pakistan; and numerous articles in scholarly journals. He has advised senior American policymakers, world leaders, and businesses, including the President, Secretary of State, senior members of the Congress, and presidential campaigns. He has written for New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, among others.
He is a member of the International Board of Advisors of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, the International Board of Advisors at the American University of Beirut, and the Board of Advisors of Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. He 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, and was named a 2006 Carnegie Scholar. 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 master’s 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.
Professor Nasr is the author of the Foreign Affairs article: All Against All: The Sectarian Resurgence in the Post-American Middle East.
Ambassador (ret.) Barbara K. Bodine (Moderator)
Barbara K. Bodine is Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy and concurrent Director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. Prior to joining Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, she taught and directed policy task forces and policy workshops on US diplomacy in the Persian Gulf region, including Iraq and Yemen for seven years at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and served as Director of the School’s Scholars in the Nation’s Service Initiative, a fellowship program for students pursuing careers in federal service.
Ms. Bodine’s over 30 years in the U.S. Foreign Service were spent primarily on Arabian Peninsula and greater Persian Gulf issues, specifically US bilateral and regional policy, strategic security issues, counterterrorism, and governance and reform. Her tour as Ambassador to the Republic of Yemen, 1997-2001, saw enhanced support for democratization and increased security and counterterrorism cooperation. Ms. Bodine also served in Baghdad as Deputy Principal Officer during the Iran-Iraq War, Kuwait as Deputy Chief of Mission during the Iraqi invasion and occupation of 1990-1991, and again, seconded to the Department of Defense, in Iraq in 2003 as the senior State Department official and the first coalition coordinator for reconstruction in Baghdad and the central governorates. Her first assignment in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs was as Country Officer for the two Yemens and security assistance coordinator for the peninsula. She later returned to that office as Deputy Director.
In addition to several other assignments in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, she was Deputy for Operations, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism and subsequently acting overall Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Director of East African Affairs, Dean of the School of Professional Studies at the Foreign Service Institute, and Senior Advisor for International Security Negotiations and Agreements in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. Ambassador Bodine is the recipient of a number of awards, including the Secretary’s Award for Valor for her work in Occupied Kuwait. She is a former member of the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Diplomacy, co-chair of the International Forum on Diplomatic Training, an associate fellow of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Since leaving the government, Ambassador Bodine has been founding Director of the Governance Initiative in the Middle East and Senior Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government and the Robert Wilhelm Fellow at MIT’s Center for International Studies. She is a past president of the Mine Awareness Group, America, a global NGO that provides technical expertise for the removal of remnants of conflict worldwide.
A native of St. Louis, Mo., Ms. Bodine is a Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara in Political Science and East Asian Studies and earned her Master’s at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. A recipient of distinguished alumni awards from both UC Santa Barbara and the Fletcher School, she is a Regent Emerita of the University of California. She resides in Alexandria, VA.
