A APSA’s MENA Program continued over the past year with a series of workshops on “The Evolving Role of Political Institutions in the Arab World.” The first event was held from September 24–28, 2018 in partnership with the Center for Studies and Research in Social Sciences (CERSS) in Rabat, Morocco. Twenty five PhD students and early-career faculty from across the MENA region, Europe, and the United States were selected to attend.

Together with a follow-up workshop in January 2019 at the University of Tunis, El Manar, the program aims to explore the relationship between formal political institutions and political liberalization in the MENA region. In Rabat, participants discussed core questions and theories of formal political institutions as well as the implications of these theories for political representation, channeling citizen interests, government performance, and more broadly, political liberalization. Classroom discussions were enhanced by visits to the Moroccan Parliament and the National Council for Human Rights. More broadly, the workshop included sessions on research design and manuscript preparation, best practices and approaches for conducting field research, and scholarly networking. Fellows also shared their own research on topics related to political institutions in the MENA region.

Co-leading the workshop were Ahmed Jazouli (Independent Scholar, Morocco), Tofigh Maboudi (Loyola University Chicago, USA), Asma Nouira (University of Tunis, El Manar, Tunisia), Abdallah Saaf (Mohammed V University, Morocco), and Peter J. Schraeder (Loyola University Chicago, USA).

Co-leaders and fellows of the 2018 MENA workshop gather during a visit to the Moroccan Parliament building in Rabat, Morocco.

APSA’s MENA Workshops are a multi-year initiative to support political science research and networking in the Arab Middle East and North Africa. Funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York, the program is a major component of APSA’s efforts to engage with political science communities outside the United States and support research networks linking US scholars with their colleagues overseas. Since 2013, over 130 scholars have taken part in the program, which is funded through 2019. For more information, visit APSA’s MENA Workshops website at http://web.apsanet.org/mena/.