Diederick J. Vanderwalle, Associate Professor of Government and Adjunct Associate Professor of Business Administration at Tuck

After much exuberance in the West about the possibility of reform in authoritarian Middle Eastern and North African countries since 2010, the actual record of liberalization and democratization has been highly mixed. Much of our misunderstanding of what has transpired in the Middle East relates to ideas the West has held about authoritarianism and its possible demise in the region, and about our convictions that political reform in all areas of the world will follow the models we in the West see as indispensable to creating modern democracies. Associate Professor Dirk J. Vandewalle is one of the few scholars regularly traveling to Libya these days, and discusses his experiences in this lecture from June 2014.