Seminars & Lectures

“Human Development and the Arab Spring – Five Years On” by Randall Kuhn

Friday, Sep 18, 2015
12:00pm -> 2:00pm
American University of Beirut (AUB)

The Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs cordially invites you to a lecture and discussion on “Human Development and the Arab Spring – Five Years On” by Randall Kuhn, associate professor at the University of Denver.

Since the 1980s, the Arab world has seen unprecedented progress in basic human development outcomes like health and education. The talk traces the role of these achievements in sowing the seeds of the 2011 Arab uprisings by dramatically increasing expectations for quality employment and marriage, enabling the use of information technologies, and promoting democratic values conducive to regime change. In this talk I revisit perhaps the most interesting and troubling trend, the rising age and cost of marriage for both men and women, over the past five years. I focus on the six nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council, where oil-rich regimes used massive public subsidies to avert popular unrest. Did these subsidies sow the seeds of a second Arab Spring by creating a bubble of ever-higher popular expectations? I offer some evidence to support this idea.

Randall Kuhn (Ph.D., Demography and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, 1999) is Director of the Global Health Affairs Program at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He brings a wide array of research methods and data sources to bear on the connections between demographic, social and political change. His cross-national research explores the effectiveness of global health policies and the role of improvements in health as a driver of social and political change.

Location: Issam Fares Institute, Auditorium – AUB