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This talk will present Dr. Abouzzohour’s book project, which explores long-term regime durability in the monarchies of the Middle East and North Africa. This study delves into dozens of upheavals, ranging from mass protests and uprisings to coup d’états and strikes, to shed light on the role of monarchical regimes’ interactions with opposition actors and societal groups in shaping their successful economic and political strategies during upheavals. Through a range of methods, this study shows that monarchical regimes systematically respond to dissent in ways that further ingrain their rule by employing a specific toolkit of strategies that de-escalates threat, and it shows the adaptive learning process of monarchs and opposition and societal groups. This book’s findings challenge post-Arab Spring notions of monarchical exceptionalism and contribute to our knowledge of authoritarian adaptive learning, Gulf rentierism, and state-society relations in authoritarian and autocratic contexts.
Dr. Yasmina Abouzzohour is a comparative political scientist specializing in regime persistence and transition, with particular emphasis on Arab monarchies and Maghreb states. She is currently an Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer at the Institute for the Transregional Study at Princeton University and a Senior Nonresident Fellow at the Atlantic Council. Prior, she served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard University.
At Princeton, Dr. Abouzzohour is completing a book on Arab monarchical survival. Her research has received awards from the American Political Science Association, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Andrew Mellon Fund, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, and the Project on Middle East Political Science, among others. She has published in academic journals such as the Middle East Journal and the Journal of North African Studies, as well as contributed to edited volumes including "The Gulf Cooperation Council at Forty " and "Foreign Policy in North Africa." She has been featured in various media outlets including BBC World, Washington Post, L’Orient-Le Jour, Akhbar Al Yaoum, Al Jazeera, and the Financial Times.
Dr. Abouzzohour received her Ph.D. in Politics and International Relations from the University of Oxford.