The Road to Damascus

Victoria Crandall (Foreign Affairs, French ’08)

Victoria Crandall (Foreign Affairs, French ’08) wears a silver medallion on a red cord around her neck. It’s a replica of a 14th century coin that she found in a shop in Córdoba this summer when she and her mother were traveling in southern Spain. What attracted her to the piece was the ornate Arabic calligraphy that the jeweler told her spells out the name of the ruler of the time.

Crandall has been fascinated with the Middle East, especially French colonial history in North Africa, for as long as she can remember. She spent a month in Algeria as a third year student when she was awarded a Harrison Undergraduate Research Award to examine the recent introduction of the native Berber language into the curriculum of Algerian schools. She has studied the Arabic language and Islam and is eager to learn more about Islamic philosophy and mysticism.

In her fourth year, she parlayed these experiences into a Distinguished Majors Project (DMP). Her thesis, “Explaining Authoritarianism’s Success in Algeria from 1988-1992,” won the Politics Department’s Emmerich Wright for the most outstanding thesis.

“I was looking at a series of political reforms in Algeria in the late 1980s to early 1990s that democratized the country and allowed for multiparty elections in 1992,” Crandall explained.

When an Islamist opposition party—the FIS—gained enough popular support to win the majority of the votes in the second round of elections, however, military leaders, fearful that reformers would change the constitution, responded by canceling these elections and suspending the government in what some people called a coup d’etat. “This was the case study that a lot people looked at and [concluded that] there can never be democracy in the Middle East,” Crandall said.

Crandall wasn’t satisfied with this conclusion, however. Through research articles, professional journals and academic texts—most of which were written in French—Crandall examined the dynamics at work among ruling elites during the country’s four-year flirt with democracy.

“Most people looked at Algeria’s experiment with democracy and asked, ‘Why did democracy fail?’” Crandall explained. “I was more interested in looking at what institutional structures allowed for the persistence of authoritarianism. I was arguing that the structure of the political elite couldn’t allow for any one leader to have a monopoly of power that could push through these political reforms, so different factions within the elite were constantly obstructing any political reforms.”

Among the texts Crandall examined were two written by her academic advisor, U.Va. Middle East expert Bill Quandt, who felt the project was unusually well done.

“[Tori] came up with a theoretically informed thesis that was particularly strong on its empirical underpinnings,” he said. “She really studied the case well and came to conclusions that were really very much her conclusions. She had obviously read what I have written, and in many places we agreed. But in some places she quite correctly staked out her own position and defended it well. It shows the kind of independence of mind that one looks for in these projects.”

Politics Department DMP Director Paul Freedman agreed. “Tori pushed herself hard in writing this thesis with really impressive results,” he said. “The awarding of the Emmerich Wright prize reflects not only the contribution of the thesis, but also her contribution to our [DMP] seminar. She struggled at times, but she worked very hard and moved in a number of different directions in an effort to frame her research question in a way that would best enable her to bring an impressive amount of information to bear on this question in a way that was efficient and logical.”

Crandall may have finished college, but she hasn’t yet finished her quest for understanding the Middle East. She leaves for Syria at the end of September where she will attend classes at the University of Damascus for up to two years.

“I feel I need to learn Arabic, and I thought the best option for me was complete immersion,” Crandall said. “I wanted the cultural experience of living in the heart of the Middle East. I feel very compelled. This is what I have to do for me. This is the next step and it’s a good time in my life to pack up my bags and do it.”