Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, Nasir Almasri heard so many discussions about the political struggles of Palestinians that by the time he was 7, he thought he’d heard enough to last a lifetime. He was wrong. Decades later, Almasri is now in his fourth year in the MIT political science PhD program pursuing answers to thorny political questions around authoritarian regimes and opposition groups — scholarship with deep roots in the dinner-table conversations of his childhood. In 2000, when Almasri was 7, intensified violence erupted between Israel and…
