Producing the Public in Arab Societies: Space Working Group

Paul Amar: Popular Embodiments and Public Morality in Libya and Egypt

Paul Amar has served from 2011-2013 as lead researcher on the project “Societal Violence and Alternative Security Practices” at Nazra for Feminist Studies in Cairo, Egypt. In the past, he has served as a Fulbright Scholar affiliated with Cairo University’s Department of Economics and Political Science, worked with the United Nations on conflict and development issues in the Middle East, cooperated on urbanism and public space research at the CEDEJ in Egypt, and been awarded fellowships for study at the American University in Cairo and the University of Marrakesh, Morocco. In 2003, he co-founded the Center for Middle East Studies at the Federal University Fluminense, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He currently serves as Associate Professor in the Global & International Studies Program of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prof. Amar's research, publishing, and teaching focuses on the areas of state institutions, security regimes, social movements, and democratic transitions in the Middle East and Latin America, and traces the origins and intersections of new patterns of police militarization, security governance, humanitarian intervention, and spatial transformation in the megacities of the global south. His books include Cairo Cosmopolitan (2006); Dispatches from the Arab Spring (2013); and The Security Archipelago (2013).