Areas of Interest: Comparative politics and political economy (development, social welfare, institutional change, business-government relations), methodology (research design and qualitative methods), and Middle Eastern and North African politics.
Melani Cammett is a Kutayba Alghanim Assistant Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Political Science at Brown University and Academy Scholar at the Weatherhead Center at Harvard University.
Cammet holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and specializes in the political economy of development and the Middle East. She also holds an MA from The Fletcher School, Tufts University and a BA, from Brown University. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on comparative politics, development, and Middle East politics. Her book, Globalization, Business Politics and Development: North Africa in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) examines how integration in global manufacturing chains reshapes business politics in developing countries, situating Morocco and Tunisia in broader comparative perspective. She has published articles in Comparative Politics, Competition and Change, Global Governance, and Arab Studies Journal. Her second book project, Citizenship and Social Welfare in the Middle East, focuses on how religious provision of social welfare affects state-building and national integration in the Middle East. She is also working on a related project explaining different subnational patterns of exclusion and inclusion in social welfare provision in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina. This research is supported by the Academy Scholars Program at Harvard, the U.S. Institute of Peace and a Solomon Faculty Grant from Brown University. She has also received fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, University of California at Berkeley, and Brown University.