Social Sciences Growing in the Arab World—But Slowly

posted on: Mar 26, 2015

Despite the rapid growth of universities in the Arab world, the social sciences are only offered by 55 percent of them, a new report has found.

“This is might be due to the fact that most existing universities in the region are relatively young,” said Mohammed Bamyeh, a sociology professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the United States and the author of the new report, Forms of Presence of the Social Science in the Arab Region. “After all, 97 percent of Arab universities—491 out of 508—were created after 1950,” said Bamyeh. He added that as many as 70 percent didn’t exist before 1991.

According to Bamyeh’s report, any growth in the social sciences has been at longstanding universities in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Tunisia and more recently in the oil-rich countries, such as Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar, that have young academic institutions.

The report, which was released as a draft last week during the Arab Council for the Social Sciences‘ second conference in Beirut, aims to analyze the presence of the social sciences in various scientific and public arenas in the region, including universities, research centers, the civil society and media.

Source: www.al-fanarmedia.org