Areas of focus: Islam and politics, U.S. Foreign Policy
Badredine Arfi received a Ph.D. in physics in 1988 and a Ph.D. in political science/international relations in 1996 both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His teaching and research interests include philosophy of social theory, discourse theory, deconstruction, Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory, theories of international relations, international security, Islam and politics, game theory, and fuzzy logic methodologies. Professor Arfi’s scholarly articles appear in such journals as International Studies Quarterly, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, International Political Sociology, Security Studies, Political Analysis, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Rationality and Society, Democratization, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review B, and Physical A. He is the author of International Change and the Stability of Multi-ethnic States (Indiana University Press, 2005), Linguistic Fuzzy Logic Methods in Social Sciences (Springer-Verlag, 2010), and Re-Thinking International Relations Theory via Deconstruction (Routledge, 2012). He has lectured widely on topics in theories of international relations and security, politics of the Middle East and North Africa, U.S. foreign policy, delivering invited papers at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, and the University of California at Berkeley.
Research
Professor Arfi is currently working on two major research projects: The first one on Islam, Translation, and Democratic Pluralism to-come and a second one on Religion and IR Theory. He is also finishing a book on Lacan’s Theory of Desire, Fantasy and the ‘Real’ via Deconstruction.