Vali Nasr was born in Iran, where his father was a high profile academic and university administrator  Then came the revolution. They fled–and that traumatic experience, he says, shaped his intellectual development in ways he is only beginning to understand.

Nasr is now dean of the School of Advanced International Studies, better known as SAIS, at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of several books including The Shia Revival which predicted the rise of sectarianism in the Middle East and Dispensable Nation which critiqued Obama administration policies in the Middle East. Nasr served in the Obama administration, working directly under Richard Holbrooke in the State Department’s Afghanistan/Pakistan policy office.

In this conversation, Nasr discusses the impact of the Iranian revolution on his own career and intellectual pursuits. He also discusses his friendship with Richard Holbrooke and how his untimely death may have altered the course of history,

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As the Syria civil war enters its seventh year, the outcome of the conflict no longer seems in doubt. With some 400,000 people killed and over 11 million Syrian displaced, its appears likely that the Syrian government will likely prevail over its armed opposition.

On the line to discuss how the Syrian government gained the upper hand, and what this means for the future of Syria is Joshua Landis, a longtime scholar and expert on the region.

Joshua Landis

Joshua Landis is someone I have turned to for many years to help me make sense of events in Syria and the broader middle east. He started his blog Syria Comment over ten years ago and has since become an oft-cited expert on Syria and the civil war. He’s a professor at the University of Oklahoma where he directs the Center for Middle East Studies.

Joshua Landis seemed destined to become one of America’s foremost Syria specialists. He spent much of his childhood and adolescence in the region, including Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. Landis describes how spending some formative years in Beirut both as a child during the height of Beirut’s cosmopolitan boom and later in his twenties during the Lebanese civil war, shaped how he understood his Syria civil war as it was unfolding.

We kick off with a discussion of the current state of the conflict in Syria before pivoting to a longer conversation about Landis’ life and career, with plenty of digressions about historic foreign policy events in the Levant.

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Maria Stephan is a pioneering academic and public intellectual who studies authoritarian regimes and how they fall. She’s the co-author with Erica Chenoweth of the groundbreaking and award winning book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict which was a first-of-its kind study that offered empirical evidence that non-violent resistance is more effective than conflict and civil war in toppling oppressive regimes. She recently lead a study with the Atlantic Council showing that authoritarianism is on the rise globally and we kick off with an extended conversation about that study and how the recent US election fits into her overall thesis.

Maria grew up in rural Vermont and we have a great conversation about the roots of her intellectual curiosity and how that took her to study and compare resistance movements around the world, including East Timor and Palestine.

Charles Kenny is an optimist. He’s the author of several book about global development, including Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding–And How We Can Improve the World Even More, which was widely hailed across the spectrum and personally endorsed by Bill Gates.

Charles is a fellow with Center for Global Development where his work focuses on a wide array of topics, including the intersection of gender and development and we kick off with a discussion of some new research he’s worked on about strategies to reduce the prevalence of female genital mutilation–otherwise known as FGM. (If you are not aware, FGM is the deliberate cutting of female genitalia, often as part of a traditional ceremony in a girl’s adolescence. And Charles has researched policies in countries that helped to sharply reduce the number of girls subjected to this practice.)

Charles was born in the United Kingdom to a British father and American mother. He traces the roots of his optimism to his charmed upbringing in academic communities around Oxford and Cambridge. He had a long career at the World Bank before settling into his perch at the Center for Global Development, from which he has written a couple of books–both of which we discuss.

This is a great conversation–and we do have an interesting discussion about the problem of measuring country’s well being exclusively by looking at its economic growth.

Dr. Peter Hotez is one of the world’s leading experts on so-called Neglected Tropical Diseases. These are a set of diseases, often times parasitic, that have historically afflicted the absolute poorest people on the planet. Some of these diseases are better known, like hookworm, leprosy, and now Zika. But most are virtually unknown outside the medical community, and many doctors as well have likely never heard of many of them.

That may soon change, thanks in part to the work of Dr. Peter Hotez. He is the founding dean of the first national school of tropical medicine in the United States, which is located at the Baylor College of medicine in Houston. Dr. Hotez is also the US Science Envoy, the Texas Children’s Hospital Chair in Tropical Pediatrics, and President-Sabin Vaccine Institute, among other affiliations.

If you follow the Middle East at all, you’ve probably read the works of my guest today, Marc Lynch.

Marc publishes widely and in a wide variety of mediums. He’s got a high volume Twitter feed under the handle @AbuAardvark and writes regularly for the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post.

He is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, and the founder and director of the Project on Middle East Political Science among other affiliations.

He is someone whose work I have  learned from and followed for several yearsThe New Arab Wars: Anarchy and Uprising in the Middle East, which explores the Arab Spring and its fallout through the prism of international relations and regional politics.

Marc discusses how he became interested in the middle east through an internship early in college, and the evolving nature of one of his key research subjects over his career, the relationship between media and politics in the Middle East. And of course, stick around until the end for his musings on how international relations theory can explain rivalries in hip hop.

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