Connections Lecture Series

The College of Arts and Sciences' Core Connections lecture series brings to campus leading thinkers to speak from different disciplinary perspectives on topics that correlate with the Core Curriculum. The series encourages you to engage with scholarly work beyond the classroom.

Younes Abouyoub, PhD. is the Head of the Governance, State-Building, conflict prevention for the MENA Region, United Nations. He is the former head of the political office of the UN Under-Secretary General for Conflict Prevention and Senior political advisor to the UN Secretary General Special Envoy to Burundi. He directed the political office of the UN Secretary General Special Envoy to Yemen. Mr. Abouyoub was also the senior political advisor of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General in Libya, and former member of the UN Security Council Panel of Experts on Sudan (Darfur conflict). He also worked in different capacities for the United Nations; the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (New York), the United Nations in Nairobi, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, as well as in several other UN duty stations around the world. In his current position, Dr Abouyoub is in charge of a diverse portfolio of programmes on governance, public policy and administration, and institutional development for conflict prevention and sustainable development, which provides member States with substantive analysis, policy advice, technical assistance, capacity-building and knowledge sharing on a host of public governance and institutional matters, including political reform and transition, public administration reform, crisis and conflict management. This holistic approach stresses the importance of laying the foundations for accountable, responsive and inclusive public governance institutions, as well as crisis management and post-conflict institutional rehabilitation. These programmes also focus on consensus-building and national dialogue efforts, and international and regional governance cooperation. Dr. Abouyoub, leads the research program for the flagship publication of the Arab Governance Report, which focuses on issues of governance, state institutions and conflict prevention, and is linked to efforts to help member States to develop transparent, accountable, inclusive and effective public institutions and, in so doing, to improve core Government services. It shares best practices, particularly with crisis-hit, conflict-affected and post-conflict countries, and Least Developed Countries, and runs innovative technical cooperation projects designed to bolster the capacity of Member States to respond to emerging crises, build resilience and prevent conflict.  Dr. Younes Abouyoub holds a Ph.D. in political sociology, M.A. and post-graduate university degrees in Geopolitics and Law. He is a contributing author, inter alia, to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Modern History, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam, The Routledge International Handbook of World-Systems Analysis, the Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (Wiley-Blackwell). He published numerous scholarly articles, op-ed articles, and contributed to edited books.