Augustus Richard Norton Helped Shape Pardee School

AUGUSTUS RICHARD NORTON, a Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies professor emeritus and an expert on the Middle East, died on February 20, 2019. He was 72.

Norton joined the BU faculty in 1993 in what was then the department of international relations, where his research interests focused on strategies of reform in authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and renewal in reformist Muslim thought. In 1996, he was appointed to the faculty of the anthropology department. He retired from BU in May 2017.

“Professor Norton was a mentor to me and so many others,” says Adil Najam, dean of the Pardee School. “When I joined Boston University as an assistant professor, my first office was right next to his. To me, he personified dignity and integrity. I learned from him that to be a professor is a privilege and a responsibility that must always be taken seriously. He demanded high standards from all around him, and held himself, always, to even higher standards. Today, I can look back to so many ways in which he helped shape what has now become the Boston University Pardee School. Dick Norton will be dearly missed.”

In the 1990s, Norton headed a widely cited three-year project funded by the Ford Foundation that examined state-society relations in the Middle East and the question of civil society in the region. The project resulted in his edited two-volume study, Civil Society in the Middle East (Brill, 1995). Perhaps his best-known book is Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2007). In a review in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Margaret Hall called it “the most fluent survey of Hezbollah to date.” Publishers Weekly described it as a “remarkably thorough, articulate portrait of Hezbollah” that is “also personal, speckled with anecdotes from more than three decades of experience.”

Norton’s experience in the Middle East included residences in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and Lebanon. Prolific as a policy commentator, his writings focused on intersectarian relations in the Middle East, reformist Muslim thought, and strategies of political reform and opposition in authoritarian states. In 2006, he was an advisor to the Iraq Study Group, also known as the Baker-Hamilton Commission. He was also a member of the Boston Study Group on Middle East Peace.

“Richard was a dedicated mentor, colleague, and scholar who challenged prevailing narratives about the people and places of the Middle East.”

In addition to Hezbollah: A Short History and Civil Society in the Middle East, Norton’s books include Amal and the Shi’a: Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon (University of Texas Press, 1987). His articles have appeared in Current History, Foreign Policy, Middle East Journal, The Nation, and in leading newspapers.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on September 2, 1946, he was commissioned from the ranks in 1966 and served in the US Army until he retired in 1993, as a colonel. He served two combat tours in Vietnam as an airborne infantry officer—as a platoon leader in the 173rd Airborne Brigade, from 1968 to 1969, and senior advisor to the First Battalion of Vietnamese Airborne Division in Vietnam, from 1970 to 1971. From 1980 to 1981, he served as an unarmed United Nations observer with the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization in southern Lebanon. In 1981, he joined the US Military Academy at West Point and taught there until 1993, rising to the rank of professor of comparative politics and Middle Eastern studies.

He earned a BA and an MA, both in political science, from the University of Miami (Florida), and a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago.

“Richard was a dedicated mentor, colleague, and scholar who challenged prevailing narratives about the people and places of the Middle East,” says Shamiran Mako, a Pardee assistant professor of international relations. “His experience in the region enabled him to analyze sociopolitical conditions from a multifaceted angle, adding nuance to complex events while, simultaneously, never underestimating the power of people to challenge well-entrenched obstacles. Although the Middle East studies community has lost a pillar, his legacy is permanently etched in his life and work and in a generation of scholars whom he has influenced.”