“Proximate politics”, where Arab citizens and state interact locally

Dr Lana Salman, with her BA and MSc degrees from AUB, recently completed her PhD at University of California-Berkeley and is now a post-doctoral research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she is preparing a book on her research into local politics and citizen-state interactions in Tunisia. In this chat she retraces her journey in academia, the World Bank, and ethnographic research in Tunisia to share her lessons about Arab attempts at decentralization and democratization, with a local communities and urban lens. She debunks some prevalent tropes about democracy and how poor or marginalized people interact with their governments in Arab societies. Her conclusion: local government reforms are the easiest and least costly to do for countries that seek better governance and satisfied citizens.