Biography

Dr Michael Willis is a Fellow of the Middle East Centre and St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford where he has taught modern Maghreb politics since 2004. Algeria: Politics and Society from the Dark Decade to the Hirak is his second book on Algeria. His first was The Islamist Challenge in Algeria; A Political History published in 1997. He is also the author of Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from Independence to the Arab Spring which came out in 2012.

Abstract

Thousands of families in Israel are demanding to know what happened to their children. In Autumn 2022, a first-of-its-kind exhibition at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, brought their story to an international audience in London. The disappeared children belonged to Jewish families who migrated to Israel from the Middle East and North Africa in the 1940s and 50s and were staying in temporary immigration camps. Over half of the children were from Yemen. The case has since become known as the Yemenite, Mizrahi, and Balkan Children Affair, a controversy which rages to this day in Israel.

Dr Hertog will present the key arguments of his new short monograph “Locked Out of Development: Insiders and Outsiders in Arab Capitalism” published by Cambridge University Press. The book argues against the received wisdom that neo-liberal reforms are the main culprit explaining slow growth, corruption and inequality across low- to mid-income Arab countries. It instead proposes that it is the uneven presence of the state – over-protecting some while neglecting others – that accounts for the region’s lopsided development and creates deep insider-outsider divides in Arab economies.

Lava Jato, an unprecedented transnational corruption investigation that started in Brazil in 2014 and spread throughout Latin America, paralyzed economies, upended elections, and collapsed governments. What made ‘the largest bribery case in history’ possible in a part of the world where impunity for grand corruption is the norm? Why did it expand beyond Brazil and why did prosecutors prove effective in some countries but not in others? To answer this question, we trace the legacy of reforms that enhanced prosecutors’ structural capacity to combat white-collar crime.

Resource transfers from developed to developing countries to help prevent and adapt to climate change play a central role in international climate policy efforts. At the same time, countries are domestically grappling with how to provide these transfers, if at all. A growing literature explores the economic logics and efficiency of international climate finance, yet the politics are particularly difficult, partly because publics are often biased towards policy at home rather than abroad.

co-authored with Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld, UCLA

Joint work with: Sean Freeder and Justin de Benedictis-Kessner

While we know quite a bit about how individual-level factors affect citizens’ knowledge of party positions, less is known about the role the information environment plays in perceptions. In this paper, we argue that for citizens to learn about parties' issue positions, they have to be exposed to a sufficient amount of political information, and information should be unbiased. The implication of our argument is that citizens are better informed about parties’ ideological positions in election time, but that this information effect is conditional on a free media environment.

A vast literature on political cycles has shown that politicians often manipulate policy tools ahead of elections to win votes. Yet much less is known about the effects of policies designed to contain these cycles. I argue that legal constraints on politicians’ discretion over inputs like spending, debt, transfers, or hiring ahead of elections simply displace –and can even exacerbate– such cycles. I demonstrate these unintended consequences using large, monthly panels of Brazilian municipalities to measure cycles in public employment.