Chris Alexander
By SHELLEY RIGGER
DavidsonNews.net
The students in Chris Alexander’s Middle Eastern Politics class at Davidson College didn’t get the lesson they were expecting Friday. Instead Dr. Alexander, the McGee director of the Dean Rusk International Studies Program and associate professor of political science, spent the hour talking about breaking news in Tunisia, the country he has studied for more than a decade.
“We’re going to step away from the syllabus because while we are sitting here, the first Arab government to fall from a popular movement might actually tumble,” Dr. Alexander told his students.
Sure enough, when he returned to his office after class the news was in: Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali had fled the country.
The sudden collapse of Tunisia’s government has made Dr. Alexander a sought-after expert source among news media around the world in the past 48 hours. Over the past two weeks he has written two articles for Foreign Policy magazine, one published on Jan. 3 as the violence in Tunisia built, and a cover story published this weekend after former President Ben Ali fled the country. More Foreign Policy articles are in the works.
Dr. Alexander began his research in Tunisia in 1992 while a Duke University grad student. He continued it in recent years, and last April published a book on the country, “Tunisia: Stability and Reform in the Modern Maghreb.” In that book, he does what few English-speaking westerners have done in recent years – shed light on a country that threw off French colonial rule in 1957 and has since built a stable, if authoritarian, system.
With Ben Ali’s government on the ropes last week, requests for interviews began pouring in from the Washington Post, New York Times, public radio, the BBC, Australian Broadcasting Cor., and others. Even Al Jazeera, a major news network located in the Middle East, sought out Alexander for comment. (He was scheduled to be interviewed Sunday night.)
Says Dr. Alexander: “This is a new thing for me. Who would have thought this little wedge of sand and palm trees would be above the fold in the New York Times and the Washington Post and on the headlines on CNN?”
The attention is not unwelcome. “It’s been a pretty crazy last 48 hours, but it’s given me a chance to stick a toe into a world I’ve always been interested in,” he said Sunday.
Scholars who specialize in obscure topics are not accustomed to this kind of attention, and Dr. Alexander doesn’t expect it to last long. Of his new-found fame he joked: “I’m not even sure I’ll get a full 15 minutes.” That’s unfortunate, since Tunisia’s future will be determined by how well the new unity government manages the task of planning the country’s first truly democratic elections.
Of the Tunisia story Dr. Alexander says, “There will come a time real soon when it fades into the background, and Tunisians will get down to the business of building new political institutions.”
The rebuilding, unlike the collapse, won’t be front page news. But we can be sure that Chris Alexander, at least, will be paying attention.
Shelley Rigger is the Brown Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College and a regular contributor to DavidsonNews.net.
RELATED LINKS
Jan. 14, 2010, ForeignPolicy.com, “Anatomy of an autocracy,” Dr. Alexander’s most recent analysis, after Ben Ali’s fall.
Jan. 3, 2010, ForeignPolicy.com, “Tunisia’s protest wave: where it comes from and what it means” – Dr. Alexander’s analysis of Tunisia’s protest movement two weeks ago, before the president fled.
Oct. 11, 2010, Davidson.edu, “Rusk Director Alexander’s Book on Tunisia Sheds New Light on That Unfamiliar Maghreb Nation”
