The Middle East Institute (MEI) is pleased to host Robert Worth for a discussion of his new book: A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
In 2011 a series of protests shook the Middle East to its core. Young Arabs, alienated by oppression and economic hardship, took to the streets to demand opportunity and an end to tyranny. Five years later, their utopian vision of revolution has been displaced violently by civil war, instability, and the return of autocracy.
With long experience in the region, a keen eye, and the vivid style of a literary journalist, Worth tells the story of the Arab Spring through the eyes and hopes of its protagonists. With diverse portraits and personal accounts from across the region, Worth explains how the Arab Spring gave way to a new age of discord. Kate Seelye, MEI Senior Vice President, will moderate.
Speaker Biography:
Contributor, The New York Times Magazine
Robert Worth is a career journalist who spent fourteen years as a correspondent for The New York Times. He served the as the Times’ correspondent in Baghdad from 2003 to 2006 and the paper’s Beirut bureau chief from 2007 to 2011. Worth was an editor of the Washington Monthly from 1998-1999 until he joined the Times as a reporter on the metropolitan desk in 2000. He continues to be a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review of Books. Last year, Worth was a public policy fellow in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Middle East Program, where he worked on A Rage for Order: the Middle East in Turmoil from Tahrir Square to ISIS.
Kate Seelye (Moderator)
Senior Vice President, MEI
Kate Seelye is senior vice president of the Middle East Institute (MEI), where she oversees communications, outreach, and programs, including the institution’s growing arts and culture program. She also serves on the board of the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University. Prior to joining MEI in 2009, Seelye worked as a radio and television journalist covering the Arab world from 2000-2009 from her base in Beirut, Lebanon. She reported on the region for National Public Radio, the PRI/BBC show, “The World,” PBS TV’s “Frontline/World” documentary program, and the renowned Channel Four British investigative television news series, “Unreported World.”
Senior Vice President, MEI
Kate Seelye is senior vice president of the Middle East Institute (MEI), where she oversees communications, outreach, and programs, including the institution’s growing arts and culture program. She also serves on the board of the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University. Prior to joining MEI in 2009, Seelye worked as a radio and television journalist covering the Arab world from 2000-2009 from her base in Beirut, Lebanon. She reported on the region for National Public Radio, the PRI/BBC show, “The World,” PBS TV’s “Frontline/World” documentary program, and the renowned Channel Four British investigative television news series, “Unreported World.”