Paul Amar, Professor in the Global Studies Department at the University of California Santa Barbara, is a political scientist and anthropologist with affiliate appointments in Feminist Studies, Sociology, Comparative Literature, Middle East Studies, and Latin American & Iberian Studies. He currently serves as Director of the MA and PhD Programs in Global Studies. Before he began his academic career, he worked in Egypt as a journalist for African News and the Cairo Times, then as a police brutality/anti-racism researcher and sexuality rights activist in Rio de Janeiro, and at the United Nations as a conflict-resolution, indigenous rights, and economic development specialist. His publications include peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Ethnic & Racial Studies, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Brasiliana, GLQ, the International Feminist Journal of Politics, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and Contemporary Political Theory. His books include: New Racial Missions of Policing (2010); Global South to the Rescue (2011); Dispatches from the Arab Spring (2013); The Middle East and Brazil (2014). His book on the racial and sexuality logics of global-south security regimes, “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.
Why I Am Involved in SSJ
“Sharing experiences between world regions is critical to making change and to changing how we know, see, and mobilize. Linking up alternatives on transnational scales can promote more vigorous scholarship and amplify the resonance of public engagement. I am committed to scholarly collaborations that illuminate racial injustice and the sexuality dimensions of power embedded in security state institutions, policing apparatuses and redistribution patterns.”