'Egypt: From Rent to Taxation': AUC remembers Samer Soliman's legacy
Ahram Online, , Sunday 25 Nov 2018


The School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University in Cairo will commemorate the memory of late economist and thinker Samer Soliamn on 26 November at 1pm in a seminar that will discuss his seminal work‘Weak State, Strong Regime.’

The seminar is titled ‘Egypt: From Rent to Taxation,’ which is inspired by Soliman's book where he asserted that Egypt as a state under Mubarak underwent a lengthy but steady transformation from rent dependency to collecting taxes.

The seminar revisits his thesis and examines the political and economic implications of this transformation.

The speakers at the seminar will be economy journalist and commentator Wael Gamal, assistant professor Mohamed Fahmy Menza, and assistant professor at the Department of Political Sciences at the AUC Amr Adly.

The seminar will be at Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud Hall, Room P071 at the AUC's campus in New Cairo.

Soliman (1968 – 2012) was an assistant professor at the Department of Political Sciences at the AUC. He was also an activist and author. He died after a battle with terminal illness in December 2012.

Soliman graduated in 1990 from Cairo University with a BS in economics. He then went on to earn a diploma in African studies in 1992, followed by a Masters in sociology from the AUC in 1997. He earned his PhD in political science from the Institute of Political Studies in Paris in 2004.

Soliman worked as an affiliate researcher at the Centre d'Études et de Documentations Économiques, Juridiques, et Sociales (CEDEJ) in Cairo. He helped found the French-language newspaper Al-Ahram Hebdo in 1994.

Soliman's major publications include his seminal 2005 book ‘Strong Regime, Weak State: The Fiscal Crisis and Political Change in Egypt under Mubarak.’ He also published a lengthy piece in the ‘Cairo Papers in Social Science’ under the title State and Industrial Capitalism in Egypt.

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