Professor of both International Relations and Anthropology at Boston University

A. Richard Norton served as an advisor to the Iraq Study Group (Baker-Hamilton Commission), and he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His research experience in the Middle East spans near three decades, including residences in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Lebanon. His current research interests include inter-sectarian relations in the Middle East, reformist Muslim thought, and strategies of political reform and opposition in authoritarian states. In the 1990s he headed a widely-cited three-year project funded by the Ford Foundation that examined the state-society relations in the Middle East and the question of civil society in the region. He is also a co-founder of the Boston Forum on the Middle East and the Conference Group on the Middle East