115 Prospect St., Rosenkranz Hall, Room 202, 11:30 a.m.
The Council on Middle East Studies and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund present:
Charles Kurzman, Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill: “When Forecasts Fail: Unpredictability in Israeli-Palestinian Interaction”.
This paper explores the paradox that forecasts may be most likely to fail during dramatic moments of historic change that social scientists are most eager to predict. It distinguishes among four types of shocks that can undermine the predictive power of time-series analyses and illustrates the significant of these shocks in Israeli-Palestinian interactions, one of the contemporary world’s most intensely scrutinized episodes, using vector autogression analyses of more than 15,000 Reuters news stories over the past three decades. The intervention of these shocks raises the prospect that some historic episodes may be unpredictable, even retrospectively.
Charles Kurzman is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-director of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations. He is author of The Missing Martyrs (2011), Democracy Denied, 1905-1915 (2008), and The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (2004), and editor of the anthologies Liberal Islam (1998) and Modernist Islam, 1840-1940 (2002).