Melani Claire Cammett, Brown University, Rhode Island

Melani Cammett is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Middle East Studies Program at Brown University. She specializes in the political economy of development and the Middle East. She earned her Ph.D. in 2002 from the Department of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley and served as an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 2005–2006 and 2007–2008. Cammett has published scholarly articles in Studies in Comparative International Development, Comparative Politics, World Development, Global Governance, and other journals. She is also completing a new book entitled Servicing Sectarianism: Welfare and Politics in Weak States, which explores how ethnic and religious parties allocate welfare goods focusing on sectarian organizations in Lebanon and other countries in the Middle East and South Asia. Her research has received support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, US Institute of Peace, Academy Scholars Program at Harvard, Social Science Research Council, American Institute for Maghrib Studies, Salomon Faculty Research Grant at Brown University, and Institute for International Studies at U.C. Berkeley. Cammett also holds an M.A.L.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (1994), received a Fulbright Fellowship in Jordan, and has consulted for development policy organizations.

Can production for global markets help business groups to mobilize collectively? Under what conditions does globalization enable the private sector to develop independent organizational bases and create effective relationships with the state? Focusing on varied Moroccan and Tunisian responses to trade liberalization in the 1990s, Melani Cammett argues that two constitutive dimensions of business-government relations shape business responses to global economic opening: the balance of power between business and the state before economic opening and the preexisting business class structure. These two dimensions combine to form different configurations of business-government relations, including 'distant' and 'close' linkages, leading to divergent interests and, hence, strategic behavior by industrialists. The book also extends the analysis to additional country cases, including India, Turkey, and Taiwan, and examines how different patterns of business-government relations affect processes of industrial upgrading.