This webinar will be the launch of Making Aid Work: Dueling with Dictators and Warlords in the Middle East and North Africa by Guilain Denoeux, Robert Springborg, and Hicham Alaoui published by Lynne Rienner Publishers.

With hardening authoritarianism and state capture by militias exacerbating the challenges faced by providers of development and political aid across the Middle East and North Africa, how can aid be made more effective? Can donors overcome the limitations of their outdated assistance playbooks? Analysing the fraught relationships between Western aid providers and MENA recipients, the authors of Making Aid Work suggest innovative, practical approaches for overcoming the chronic limitations—and disappointing results—of assistance aimed at encouraging economic development and political reform in the region.

Meet our speakers and chair

Guilain Denoeux is professor of government at Colby College. His areas of expertise include: Middle Eastern and North African politics, terrorism, insurgency and counter-extremism programming and democracy-building strategies and activities. In the past twenty-five years, he also has served as a regular adviser to the Department of State and USAID and has briefed senior staff of both organizations in Washington, D.C. as well as overseas. He has conducted policy-oriented field research across the Middle East, North Africa, Southeastern Europe, the Caucasus, the Balkans, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia. Denoeux's writings have appeared in Middle East Policy, Comparative Politics, Maghreb-Machrek, Arabies, amongst others. His writing as featured in several books, including Urban Unrest in the Middle East and Legislative Politics in the Arab World. 

Robert Springborg is nonresident research fellow of the Italian Institute of International Affairs and adjunct professor in the School of International Studies at Simon Fraser University. He was the holder of the MBI Al Jaber Chair in Middle East Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he also served as Director of the London Middle East Institute. His publications include Mubarak’s Egypt. Fragmentation of the Political Order (1989); Family Power and Politics in Egypt (1982); Legislative Politics in the Arab World (1999, co-authored with Abdo Baaklini and Guilain Denoeux); Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East first and second editions, (2001 and 2010, co-authored with Clement M. Henry); Oil and Democracy in Iraq (2007); Development Models in Muslim Contexts: Chinese, ‘Islamic’ and Neo-Liberal Alternatives (2009) and several editions of Politics in the Middle East (co-authored with James A. Bill). He co-edited a volume on popular culture and political identity in the Gulf that appeared in 2008. He has published in the leading Middle East journals and was the founder and regular editorialist for The Middle East in London, a monthly journal that commenced publication in 2003.

Greg Shapland is a Research Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre and Principal Investigator and UKRI FCDO Senior Research Fellow on the project, ‘The Political Economy of Water in the MENA Region: A Cross-Regional Assessment’. His entire career has been focussed on the Middle East and North Africa, whether as a commercial representative, university lecturer or government official (in the Ministry of Defence, Cabinet Office and FCO).