Paul Amar

Paul Amar
Affiliated Faculty
Global Studies

Office Location

SSMS 2119

Specialization

  • Comparative Politics
  • Middle East Politics
  • Social Movements and Revolution
  • Critical Security Studies
  • Police and Military Studies
  • Human Rights / Socio-Legal Studies
  • Latin American Studies (especially Brazil, liberalization, human rights, sexuality/race/religion, urban inequality, state theory, regionalism)
  • Middle East Studies (esp. Egypt, Persian Gulf, Lebanon, regionalism, public security, state theory, globalization, urban development, morality, masculinity, gender/sexuality)
  • Theories of state, governance, institutional and legal change
  • Queer Theory
  • Post-Colonial Studies

Bio

Paul Amar, Professor in the Global Studies Department at the University of California Santa Barbara and Director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, is a political scientist and  anthropologist with affiliate appointments in Feminist Studies,  Sociology, Comparative Literature, Middle East Studies, and Latin  American & Iberian Studies. Before he began his academic career, he worked as a journalist in Cairo, a police reformer and sexuality rights activist in Rio de Janeiro, and as a conflict-resolution and economic development  specialist at the United Nations. His books include: Cairo Cosmopolitan (2006); New Racial Missions of Policing (2010); Global South to the Rescue (2011); Dispatches from the Arab Spring (2013);  and The Middle East and Brazil (2014).

His book, "The Security Archipelago" was awarded the Charles Taylor  Award for "Best Book of the Year" in 2014 by the Interpretive Methods  Section of the American Political Science Association.

Courses

  • Gender and Human Rights in the Middle East
  • Comparative Ideologies and World Order
  • Comparative Urban Politics
  • Introduction to Global Political and Economic Processes
  • Critical Security and Terrorism Studies
  • Human Rights and Globalization in Latin America & Caribbean
  • Human Rights and Globalization in the Middle East
  • Global Policing of Sex and Drugs
  • Introduction to Socio-Legal Studies
  • Politics of Sexuality
  • Race, Gender and Global Ethnography
  • International Relations: Race, Ethnicity Nationalism