Department of International Relations | Faculty

Augustus Richard Norton

Augustus Richard Norton
Department of International Relations
152 Bay State Road
Room 440
Boston, Massachusetts 02215
(617) 353-7808
(617) 353-9290 fax
arn@bu.edu

Professor of International Relations and Anthropology. (BA, MA, University of Miami; PhD, University of Chicago)

Specialization: Comparative Politics, U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East, Middle Eastern Studies, Political Anthropology.

Professor Norton is a faculty member of both International Relations and Anthropology. His research experience in the Middle East spans near three decades, including residences in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Lebanon. His current research interests include inter-sectarian relations in the Middle East, reformist Muslim thought, and strategies of political reform and opposition in authoritarian states. In the 1990s he headed a widely-cited three-year project funded by the Ford Foundation that examined the state-society relations in the Middle East and the question of civil society in the region. It is indicative of his interests that many of his courses are often cross-listed with the departments of anthropology and political science. He has held academic appointments at New York University and the United States Military Academy. In 2006 he was an advisor to the Iraq Study Group (Baker-Hamilton Commission).

His books include Hezbollah: A Short History , the two volume collection Civil Society in the Middle East , Amal and the Shi'a: Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon , The International Relations of the PLO (senior editor), Political Tides in the Arab World (co-author), UN Peacekeepers (co-author), and Security in the Middle East: New Perspectives (in Arabic) and. His recent articles have appeared in Current History, Foreign Policy, International Spectator, Journal of Palestine Studies, Middle East Journal, The Nation, and in leading newspapers. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Middle East Studies Association, the American Anthropological Association, the American Political Science Association, the Academic Board of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and he is a co-founder of the Boston Forum on the Middle East and the Conference Group on the Middle East.