Yahya Sadowski Joins SPP as Professor of Political Economy
The School of Public Policy is pleased to announce that Yahya Sadowski will be joining the founding faculty of SPP as Professor of Political Economy.
Yahya Sadowski joins SPP from PFCEnergy where he is senior political risk analyst. He provides assessments about the political economy of late-developing countries and global energy policy to private and national oil companies, national and international energy regulatory agencies, and a number of key governments.
He pioneered PFCEnergy’s Future of the World project that studies how long-term trends in economics, politics, and technology interact. His academic arena of expertise focuses upon the problems of governance and state formation and how they interact to promote or retard economic development. He has special expertise on Middle Eastern states (Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran) but also keeps track of wider issues such as the evolution of China and the travails of political Islam.
Sadowski is a deeply committed teacher who has taught at universities across the world. In 2008-2009 Yahya taught at Nanjing University in China. He has also lived or worked in Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Previously, he was a senior fellow at Washington’s premier think tank, the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Johns Hopkins University (SAIS), the University of California, Berkeley, and the American University of Beirut. He has won distinguished teaching awards from both Berkeley and SAIS. He has held offices in a variety of professional and social organizations, including the Middle East Studies Association of North America and the Muslim Students Network. He has received fellowships and grants from the Carnegie Endowment, the Fulbright Commission, the Arab Studies Institute and the University of California.
Sadowski has a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. His PhD focused on Political Power and Economic Organization in Syria: The Course of State Intervention, 1946-1958. He is the author of dozens of articles and three books, including The Myth of Global Chaos (a critique of globalization theory). He has served on the editorial boards of the Middle East Report and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. At SPP Sadowski will join the faculty teaching the core course 'Evolution of Modern Governance'. He will also teach classes on the political economy of the Middle East, global energy architecture, state formation and on building and sustaining democracies.