Lydia Assouad
Lydia Assouad is Assistant Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, Department of International Development. In 2024, she will also become an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Her research interests lie at the intersection of development economics, political economy and economic history, with a particular focus on the Middle East.
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Follow Lydia on
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Lydia Assouad is Assistant Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, Department of International Development. In 2024, she will also become an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Her research interests lie at the intersection of development economics, political economy and economic history, with a particular focus on the Middle East.
In their own words…
IEA – Can you tell us how you got interested in economics, and in political economy in particular?
Lydia – During my undergraduate years, I quickly knew that the questions that motivated me the most were political: How can we build institutions ensuring an equitable distribution of economic and political resources? What can foster democratization? I followed an interdisciplinary program in humanities and studied economics and mathematics alongside sociology, history and philosophy. My first economics classes were quite heterodox and I quickly learnt that it was possible to study political questions within economics – basically that political economy as a field existed. I now realize that it is quite rare to know this early on. I had a comparative advantage in mathematics, so I decided to specialize in economics rather than in political sociology, knowing that I could answer similar questions, but with different methods.
IEA – Your work focuses on political economy in the Middle East. In what ways do you think is the Middle East distinctive when it comes to studying questions in political economy?
Lydia – The Middle East obviously has a distinctive political economy: crony capitalism is pervasive, the line between public and private capital is blurry, authoritarian regimes tend to be quite resilient, violence has been endemic for decades.
But I think that what motivated me to specialize in the political economy of the region is not its distinctiveness but perhaps its distinctive treatment and the fact that it is understudied by economists. I was disappointed to never see the region appear in my economics syllabi and was left unsatisfied by the frequent “exceptionalism” rhetoric about the region – which quickly jumps to culturalist interpretations.
So, it is rather my willingness to study the region as any other context, using economists’ tools that motivated my specialization. I also thought that given by double culture as French and Syrian, I was exposed to different narratives and could contribute to working on the region. For example, my first work on the measurement of income and wealth inequality in Lebanon and in the Middle East as a whole was partly motivated by the fact that I thought scholarship focused mostly on religious rather than economic cleavages. Obviously religious cleavages matter in the region, but the class dimension is also important, as in any other context, and taking it into account has clear policy consequences.
IEA – Can you tell us how a bit about your work on the dissemination of nationalism in Turkey?
Lydia – Before starting my PhD, I was a lecturer at Galatasaray University in Istanbul in 2015-2016. This year was a critical juncture in Turkish recent history, and led to the strengthening of Erdogan’s power and to the transition towards a more presidential and less democratic system. I was closely following Turkish politics and many analysts were talking about this transition as a “cultural counter revolution”, in opposition to Atatürk’s nation-building policies in the 1920s and 1930s. I started reading about the period, to understand whether Atatürk’s nation-building program was indeed partly at the origins of today’s rise of authoritarianism, success of political Islam and increased polarization in Turkey, as often hypothesized. This is what led me to work on nation-building in Turkey, to try to understand under which conditions nation-building policies are successful and when they fail.
In one of my projects, I focus on one nation-building tool: the official visits Ataturk made when Turkey was created in 1923, in order to explain the nation-building program and what it meant to be a “modern Turkish man”. What is interesting is that Ataturk not only designed the Turkish nation-building reforms, but he also took a personal role order to rally citizens around his program and visited over a quarter of all Turkish districts between 1923 and his death in 1938. I estimate the impact of these propaganda visits on the success of nation-building which I measure through the spread of first names in “Pure Turkish”, the new language introduced by the state as part of its homogenizing endeavor. I argue that the diffusion of the new language, which was one of the nation-building policy, can proxy for the successful penetration of the central state nationalist ideology in the peripheries. I find that Atatürk’s visits did increase the use of first names in the new language. The effect is persistent, growing in magnitude. This pattern of propagation can be explained by two main mechanisms. First, the effect is stronger in districts with more nationalistic associations, higher literacy rates and where Atatürk met with local elites rather than with the masses, suggesting that co-optation of the elite is a key driver of the effect. Second, the visits provided the ground for institution building, as they led to the formation of local branches of Atatürk’s party. These branches, in turn, also have a positive impact on the diffusion of the first names. Overall, the findings suggest that the propaganda was partly successful, mostly among an urbanized elite, which might have been enough to legitimize the new nation, but which might have lay the foundations for future cleavages.
IEA – Researchers from developing countries, especially women, can face serious obstacles in accessing research networks in advanced countries. Did you face such obstacles? What was most helpful in overcoming them?
Lydia – I am French and Syrian, born and raised in France. I went to French institutions and had the privilege to not face these obstacles. More generally, at least in academia, I always felt that my Syrian background was valued and gave me a legitimacy to work on the region. I mostly faced barriers as a female economist rather than as an Arab economist -but again, this is very specific to my own situation and perhaps because I specialized on the region. What has been the most helpful way to overcome such barriers are mostly informal networks of women, in particular junior women in the profession who mentored me and created spaces to safely talk about gender and race in the profession. I feel that it is fundamental to develop these informal spaces and to clearly signal that they exist to younger generation (research assistants and students). Of course, this is a short-term solution and I hope that such spaces can be institutionalized in the future to fight discrimination more efficiently.