Abboud to Discuss Syria on WHYY’s Radio Times, Aug. 9

By Purnell T. Cropper | August 8, 2012

Dr. Samer Abboud, Assistant Professor of History and International Studies, will be a featured guest on Radio Times on Thursday, Aug. 9. He will discuss events in Syria with journalist Stephen Starr and host Marty Moss-Coane. The show will air at 10 a.m.

Listen on the radio or online at www.whyy.org/91FM/live.html. The show will be rebroadcast at 10 p.m. and archived online.

From the Radio Times website:

The conflict in Syria has claimed more than 17,000 lives by some estimates. What started as a peaceful protest to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime almost a year and a half ago has turned into a bloody civil war and one that is increasingly sectarian.  For two weeks now, fierce fighting has ravaged the country’s most populous city, Aleppo, as government forces try to take back rebel held neighborhoods.  But analysts are predicting the collapse of the Assad’s government, particularly after 20 high-level government defections, including Syria’s prime minister.  This hour, we get an update on the crisis, talk about the country’s future, and discuss that the international community should play in the conflict or in a transition?

Abboud received his Ph.D. in Arab and Islamic Studies from the University of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies in 2007, where he conducted research on the political economy of marketization in Syria. In his research and teaching, he explores a range of questions informing the fields of International Political Economy and International Relations, particularly in the context of the non-Western World.

Abboud has published in such journals as Arab Studies QuarterlyNew Political Science, and The International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, as well as in several edited collections. In addition to this, he has written extensively on Syria’s political economy and is the co-author (with Benjamin J. Muller) of the forthcoming Rethinking Hizballah: Authority, Legitimacy, Violence (Ashgate). Abboud also serves as a Fellow at the Center for Syrian Studies in St. Andrew’s Scotland, and in 2013 will be a resident fellow in Berlin at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, where he was awarded a fellowship under their Arab Transformation Fellowship program.

He contributes to the Carnegie Middle East Center, a public policy think tank and research center based in Beirut, Lebanon.