About

Wendy Pearlman is a Jane Long Professor of Arts and Sciences and a Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. Her scholarly focus is on the comparative politics of the Middle East, social movements, conflict processes, emotions, migration and refugee studies, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. She has conducted research and studied in various countries including Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Spain, Germany, Israel, and the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Pearlman is the author of six books, notably including 'Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada,' 'Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement,' and 'We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria.' Her work has been published extensively in academic journals such as the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, and International Migration Review, among others. Since June 2023, she has served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Perspectives on Politics. Her teaching has been recognized with several awards, including the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence and the Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award. Pearlman has held prestigious fellowships, including being an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and a Starr Foundation Fellow at the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad at the American University in Cairo.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Social Science
• Law
• Psychology
• Public relations
• Epistemology
• Economics
• Computer Security
• Political economy
• Social psychology
• Engineering ethics
• Economic geography
• Geography
• Engineering
• Data science
• Gender studies
• Development economics
• Management

Selected publications

• Note from the Editors

  Perspectives on Politics · 2026-03-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• From ‘Refugee Crisis’ to ‘Integration’ to ‘Return’? Conceptual Lenses in the Study of Syrian Displacement and Diasporisation

  International Migration · 2026-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Note from the Editors

  Perspectives on Politics · 2025-03-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Genocide in Syria, Gaza, and Beyond: An interview with Yassin al-Haj Saleh

  Journal of Genocide Research · 2025-07-04

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Note from the Editors

  Perspectives on Politics · 2025-09-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Note from the Editors

  Perspectives on Politics · 2025-06-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Why Syria's Civil Society is the Key

  Journal of democracy · 2025-03-27 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract: Syria's best asset for an inclusive, transparent, and participatory political transition is its civil society. During years of uprising and war, citizens built diverse initiatives to achieve political change, raise awareness, pursue justice, and provide humanitarian relief. Today, organizations inside and outside the country have the capacity, experience, and will to push for democracy. They are already doing so by mobilizing pressure to demand accountability; cultivating democratic citizenship; channeling expertise to resolve key state challenges; and helping to alleviate the population's dire material needs. International parties must follow the lead of the Syrian grassroots and support their priorities and work.

  PublisherDOI

• Report of the Editors of <i>Perspectives on Politics</i> to the American Political Science Association, 2024

  Political Science Today · 2025-05-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Note from the Editors

  Perspectives on Politics · 2025-12-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The Politics of Policing P olicing is a crucial topic for political science not only due to its intrinsic importance but also as a window into larger questions related to authority, law, statesociety relations, inequality, violence, organizational culture, bureaucratic politics, and race and racism, among others.This special section probes the politics of policing with approaches as diverse as political theory, geospatial analysis, large-n events data, survey experiments, and single and comparative case studies.As a collection, these articles shed light on policing as a dependent variable and an independent variable, examine its relationships to social movements and racial segregation, and explore the circumstances that lead law enforcement agents to harm the very communities that they are charged with protecting.The first two articles treat policing behavior as an outcome to be explained."A Democracy of Authorities: Broken Windows Policing and the Neoconservative Political Theory of Law and Order" argues that standard neoliberal interpretations of policing fail to account for support for tough-on-crime agendas from marginalized communities.Probing this puzzle, Milo Ward shifts from an explanation centered on neoliberalism to one focused on neoconservatism and theorizes the right-wing political sensibilities underlining broken windows policing.Ward traces these ideas to James Q. Wilson's theories developed after the urban crisis of the 1960s and 1970s, as scrutinized in Wilson's papers at the RAND Corporation Archives.He argues that Wilson viewed urban problems as a crisis of moral and political authority rather than material deprivation and thus envisioned punitive policing less as a strategy for reducing crime than a way of restoring authorities in communities.Specifically, broken windows policing was seen as a way to cultivate relationships between formal authorities, such as the police, and informal leaders, such as parents, teachers, and business owners, and thereby ease urban communities' anxieties and empower them from within.Challenging the view that overpoliced communities are inherently opposed to the police as instruments of state repression, this work contributes to a growing literature on the multiracial and cross-class coalitions that support punitive politics and encourages continued nuanced work in this realm.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Note from Editors

  Perspectives on Politics · 2024-03-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Perspectives: work on any topic that transcends narrow niches of knowledge and links to broad questions about politics or political science as a discipline.In this note, we would like to continue our message to authors with some more description of our review process.We do this in the spirit of

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ana Arjona

  18 shared

• Boaz Atzili

  13 shared

• JENNIFER BOYLAN

  University of Oxford

  9 shared

• SARAH E. MOORE

  University of Salzburg

  9 shared

• Jillian Schwedler

  5 shared

• Zachariah Mampilly

  CUNY School of Law

  5 shared

• Scott J. Spitzer

  California State University, Fullerton

  4 shared

• Leonardo R. Arriola

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Political Science

  University of Chicago

  2002

• M.A., Political Science

  University of Chicago

  1999

• B.A., Political Science

  University of California, Berkeley

  1996

Awards & honors

• Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellen…
• Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award
• R. Barry Farrell Award for Excellence in Teaching
• Associated Student Government Faculty Honor Roll
• Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow