Lisa Anderson

You know, as someone who had focused her career on the Middle East and whose scholarship was rooted in you know, the sort of dominant conventional wisdom of academic Middle East studies was these autocracies always muddle through.

They're here for a long time, right? That Lisa Anderson article from, you know, the 1990s, that was the conventional wisdom in the field.

And so I would say that academic Middle East folks didn't necessarily do a great job of anticipating the uprisings.

I was one of a fairly small number of scholars who were writing about the potential for disruption of that autocratic status quo in the years ahead.