SISMEC BOARD REPORT SPRING 2012

SISMEC began in 2010 as an initiative for the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies (at the time the Department of Near Eastern Studies) with a mandate to recruit and train MA students in the culturally and historically grounded study of Middle Eastern conflicts. By our upcoming two year anniversary, our people, projects and developments plans bespeak the energy and excitement that this project has attracted.

Our first three MA students from the original research team will have graduated from the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies and will be going on to either government service or PhD programs in the US and UK. Matt Flannes’ MA thesis on the ideology and practice of ‘creative destruction’ and the Iraqi economy during the war was commended by SISMEC board member and veteran US diplomat Ambassador David Dunford as ‘providing an explanation for what seemed inexplicable policy’ even as Ambassador Dunford was serving as the State Department mentor to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry during the Bremer interregnum.

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