Speaker and Facilitator Profiles

Mohammed Ayoob is University Distinguished Professor of International Relations, Michigan State University. He holds a joint appointment in James Madison College and the Department of Political Science and is the Coordinator of the Muslim Studies Program. A specialist on issues of conflict and security in the post-colonial world, he has written on security issues relating to South Asia, the Middle East and Southeast Asia as well as on conceptual and theoretical issues relating to security and conflict in the international system. In addition, he has published books and articles on the intersection of religion and politics in the Muslim World. He has authored and/or edited 11 books and published around 90 research papers in leading academic journals and as book chapters. His books include, The Politics of Islamic Reassertion (1981) and The Third World Security Predicament: State Making, Regional Conflict, and the International System (1995). His latest book, The Many Faces of Political Islam, was published in 2007 by the University of Michigan Press. The book challenges other commonly held views that create what Ayoob calls “a highly distorted overall perception” of the Muslim world.

Catherine Boone is a Professor within the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her PhD in Political Science from MIT. Boone specialises in comparative politics, with an emphasis on theories of political economy and economic development. She has conducted research on industrial, commercial, and land tenure policies in West Africa, where her work has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright, the World Bank, and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Her current research focuses on territorial politics and rural property rights in contemporary Africa. She is author of Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal (1992), which was a finalist for the African Studies Association's Herskovitz book award, and Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice (2003), which won the Mattei Dogan Award from the Society for Comparative Research. She is currently serving as President of the West Africa Research Association, which directs the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal. In 2005, she was elected to the Executive Council of the American Political Science Assocation.

Abdou Filali-Ansary is the Director of the Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC) in London since 2002. Previously he served as the founding Director of the King Abdul-Aziz Foundation for Islamic Studies and Human Sciences in Casablanca, Morocco and as Secretary-General of the Mohammed V University in Rabat, having also taught modern philosophy there. He has contributed widely to the academic discourse on Islam and modernity, and democratisation and civil society in the Middle East. His most recent publication, Le sens de l'histoire [Meaning and End of History] was published jointly by the Roi Abdul Aziz Foundation, Casablanca and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in January 2008. The book is the result of a symposium held in Casablanca by the Roi Abdul Aziz Foundation for the Etudes Islamiques et les Sciences Humaines. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Islam’s reformist traditions, including Is Islam Hostile to Secularism? (1996, 1999), Reforming Islam: an Introduction to Contemporary Debates (2003) as well as a translation into French of Ali Abdel-Raziq’s landmark book Islam and the Foundations of Political Power (1994). In 1993 he cofounded the bilingual Arabic-French journal Prologues: revue maghrébine du livre.

Clement Henry is a Professor within the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to the politics of international oil, his research interests include banking systems in Islamic Mediterranean countries, Islamic banking, and the development of civil societies in the Arab world. In The Mediterranean Debt Crescent (1996, 1997) he examined interrelationships between financial and political liberalisation in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey. He has also co-authored, with Robert Springborg, Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East (2001), and co-edited and contributed to The Politics of Islamic Finance(2004) with Rodney Wilson. Current research interests include the impact of political regimes upon economic policy making and development in the Middle East and North Africa, dilemmas of financial liberalisation and transparency, applications of financial power to the Middle East peace process and theoretical implications of financial globalisation for comparative politics. Recent articles by Henry include a contribution to Oil and Democracy in Iraq(2007) and ‘Tunisia’s “Sweet Little Rogue” Regime’ (2007) in Worst of the Worst: Dealing with Repressive and Rogue Nations.

William Hurst is Assistant Professor within the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Chinese Studies, Oxford University. He received his PhD in Political Science from University of California, Berkeley. His fields of research include Chinese politics and comparative politics. He is the author of The Chinese Worker after Socialism (Cambridge University Press) which is scheduled for release in February 2009. Hurst’s other publications include ‘Understanding Contentious Collective Action by Chinese Laid-off Workers: The Importance of Regional Political Economy’ (2004) in Studies in Comparative International Development and ‘China’s Contentious Pensioners’ (2002) in The China Quarterly, co-authored with Kevin J O’Brien.

Ishrat Husain is Chairman of the National Commission for Government Reform in Pakistan. Husain, who obtained his PhD in Economics from Boston University, was the Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan for six years. He has previously held the post of Director for Central Asian Republics at the World Bank. This position’s primary focus was the management of the World Bank’s relations, policies, and programmes with countries in Central Asia. Prior to this he was the Director of the Poverty and Social Policy Department of the World Bank, where his responsibilities included poverty reduction, gender relations and dynamics, NGOs, and reform within the public sector. Husain served as Chief Economist for Africa and later became Chief Economist of the World Bank for the East Asian and Pacific region, with a focus on China from 1991 - 1994. He also assisted in the development of the World Bank’s strategic approach to Latin American debt problems which subsequently resulted in the Bank’s support for the Brady Initiative of Debt Reduction. His publications include Dollars, Debts, and Deficits (2004) and Pakistan: The Economy of an Elitist State (1999).

Mushtaq Khan is Professor of Economics within the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences at SOAS. He received his PhD in Economics from Cambridge University. Khan’s research interests lie in the areas of institutional economics, the economics of rentseeking, corruption and clientelism, industrial policy, and state intervention in developing countries. Other interests include South and South East Asian economic development with a particular focus on the Indian subcontinent. Khan’s teaching interests include microeconomics, the political economy of institutions and South Asian economic development. He is the editor of State Formation in Palestine: Viability and Governance during a Social Transformation (2004) and is the author of numerous chapters in books including ‘Corruption and Governance in Early Capitalism: World Bank Strategies and their Limitations’ (2002) in Reinventing the World Bank and ‘The Capitalist Transformation’ (2005) in The Origins of Development Economics: How Schools of Economic Thought Have Addressed Development. His articles have appeared in Democratization, Journal of Agrarian Change, New Political Economy, Journal of International Development, New Political Economy, and The European Journal of Development Research.

Robert Springborg is currently the MBI Al Jaber Chair in Middle East Studies and has been Director of the London Middle East Institute at SOAS since October 2002. He obtained his PhD in Political Science from Stanford University in 1974. Most recently, Springborg is the editor of Oil and Democracy in Iraq (SOAS Middle East Issues) (2007). He has published two monographs on Egypt, another on the role of legislatures in political transitions in the Middle East and is the co-author of a widely used textbook on the comparative politics of the Middle East. He was associated with Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia for 27 years where he became a University Professor of Middle East Politics. While there, he founded and administered a Middle East Centre and served as President of the Australasian Middle East Studies Association. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Sydney, and Canterbury University.

Barbara Stallings is Director of the Watson Institute and is a leading political economist who works on development issues with a focus on Latin America and East Asia. Stallings is the William R Rhodes Research Professor at the Institute, co-director of Brown’s Graduate Program in Development, codirector of the Brown-Brandeis APEC Studies Centre, and editor of Studies in Comparative International Development. Stallings has a PhD in economics from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in political science from Stanford University. Her areas of interest range from economic reform and development in Latin America and East Asia to finance for development, development strategy and international political economy. She is author or editor of 11 books and numerous book chapters and articles. Most recently, she co-authored a book titled Finance for Development: Latin America in Comparative Perspective (2006) published by the Brookings Institution. She has served on the editorial boards of several journals, including Studies in Comparative International Development, Oxford Development Studies, Competition and Change, Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, International Studies Quarterly, American Journal of Political Science, and Latin American Research Review.