Description:

Co-sponsored by Medill and MENA (Middle East and North African Studies Program)

The key drivers of discontent in the Arab world are not sufficiently covered by the global media. The most frightening thing about ISIS is how it reveals the structural problems, disparities, and inequities across the Arab world -- mostly with active U.S., Western, Russian, Saudi, and Iranian support -- that must be reformed and redressed if the Middle East is to enjoy peace and security. Breaking up ISIS’s headquarters in Raqqa and Mosul without touching the underlying drivers that gave birth to it will only set the stage for more turbulent and violent years ahead. Based on the speaker’s current book project, the lecture explores reasons why millions of people in the Arab world and abroad like, support, or join ISIS and reframes some of the most under-covered stories in the Middle East.

About the Speaker: Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated political columnist and book author. He was the founding director, and is now a senior fellow, at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, where he is also an adjunct professor of journalism. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Kennedy School of Harvard University. He has BA and MSc degrees respectively in political science and mass communications from Syracuse University and is a member of the Joint Advisory Board of Northwestern University in Qatar.