In the last ten years the Middle East has been at the center of national security and foreign policy discussion. Do Middle East scholars seek to convert their expertise into policy advice and do policymakers want input from Middle East scholars? PK: The Middle East is rife with political tension-internal, domestic political tension, at least partially connected to the Israeli-Arab conflict-and because scholars often get typecast, rightly or wrongly, as belonging to one camp or another in this conflict, they are often perceived as biased. As a result there has not been a very deep reliance on university academics that specialize in the Middle East. A few have actually served on the National Security Council in the past, but there have not been many. Additionally, the "think-tank culture" of Washington has subsumed some of that because people living in Washington rotate between government and these institutions to craft policy. précis: What is MIT's relationship to the policymaking community?

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In societies with widespread gender discrimination, development programs with gender quotas are considered a way to improve women's economic, political, and social status. Using a randomized field experiment across 500 Afghan villages, we examine the effects of a development program that mandates female participation. We find that even in a highly conservative context like Afghanistan, such initiatives improve outcomes specific to female participation in some economic, social, and political activities, including increased mobility and income generation. They, however, produce no change in more entrenched female roles linked to family decision-making or in attitudes toward the general role of women in society.

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Whereas altruism drives the evolution of human cooperation, ethno-religious diversity has been considered to obstruct it, leading to poverty, corruption, and war. We argue that current research has failed to properly account for the institutional environment and how it affects the role diversity plays. The emergence of thriving, diverse communities throughout human history suggests that diversity does not always lead to cooperation breakdown. We conducted experiments in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina with Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks at a critical historic moment in the city's postwar history. Using a public goods game, we found that the ability to sanction is key to achieving cooperation in ethno-religiously diverse groups, but that sanctions succeed only in integrated institutional environments and fail in segregated ones. Hence, we show experimentally for the first time in a real-life setting that institutions of integration can unleash human altruism and restore cooperation in the presence of diversity.