Abdelwahab El-Affendi is Professor of Politics, Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, and coordinator of the Democracy and Islam Program at the University of Westminster (since 1998). He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Reading, UK. In 2015, El-Affendi published a book called Genocidal Nightmares: Narratives of Insecurity and the Structure of Mass Atrocities, (Bloomsbury Academic). Previously, he worked as a diplomat in the Sudanese Foreign Minstery (1990-1997).
Adham Saouli is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations at University of St Andrews, UK. He received his PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2009. His research is in the fields of International Relations and Comparative Politics, focusing on the Middle East region. In 2019, he published his second book Hezbollah: Socialisation and its Tragic Ironies.
Azmi Bishara is a Palestinian intellectual and political writer. He holds a PhD in philosophy, and he is currently the General Director of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies. Bishara received the Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2002 and the Global Exchange Human Rights Award in 2003. Bishara is particularly known for his research on civil society, theories of nationalism, religion and secularism, and his analysis of society and the state in Israel. Azmi Bishara also conducted interdisciplinary research into the issue of sectarianism, culminating in the book: Sect, Sectarianism and Imagined Sects.
Luai Ali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, and a researcher at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies. He has a PhD in Comparative Politics, and is an expert in nationalism and comparative political institutions – specifically parliamentary institutions in authoritarian regimes. Ali has written on the politics of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other countries in the GCC for such outlets as Omran and Al-Thaabet wal-Mutahawel. His latest project examines the consultative councils in the GCC countries, and the role these councils play in policy-making.
Majed Al Ansari is Assistant Professor of Political Sociology at Qatar University and the Manager of the Policy Department at the Social and Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI). He received his PhD degree in Social Change from the University of Manchester. Al Ansari previously served at the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs and various civil society institutions. He has contributed extensively as a political analyst to various media outlets. In addition, Al Ansari writes a weekly column for the Qatari daily, Al Sharq.
Marc Caball is an historian and Associate Professor in the School of History, University College Dublin. He was awarded a DPhil from the University of Oxford, UK. Caball is also the lead investigator on the Irish Research Council funded project ‘Mapping readers and readership in Dublin, 1826-1926: a new cultural geography’. His research interests center on early modern Ireland and the history of the early modern British Atlantic. His current research projects are focused on the cultures of communication in early modern Ireland and the Tralee fascicle, for the Royal Irish Academy’s Irish Historic Towns Atlas.
Morten Valbjørn is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. He holds a PhD in Science from Aarhus University. Valbjørn has published a number of research papers in established international journals and edited volumes, such as Studying identity politics in Middle East international relations before and after the Arab uprisings in Raymond Hinnebusch & Jasmine Gani (eds.) The Routledge Handbook to the Middle East and North African State and States System (Routledge, 2020). His research interests are Middle Eastern Islamism before and after 2011 and sectarian politics before, during and after 2011.
Assistant Professor on the Master’s Program in Critical Security Studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. He has held a research fellowship with honours for three years (2019-2022) at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter (UK). He specializes in analyzing government security policies, military and strategic studies, the security of ethnic and sectarian conflicts, and security sector reform processes. He has published many academic and executive-advisory works.
Nader Hashemi is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver, USA. He obtained his doctorate from the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Hashemi’s intellectual and research interests are related to debates on religion and democracy, secularism and its discontents, the Middle East, democratic and human rights struggles in non-Western societies and Islam-West relations.
Nour Munawar is a PhD researcher at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM) & the Amsterdam Centre for Ancient Studies and Archaeology (ACASA). He is mainly interested in cultural heritage management and conflict archaeology. Prior to his admission at University of Amsterdam, Nour finished a Master in Archaeology from the University of Warsaw-Poland. Nour is currently working on his PhD Project: “The (Re)construction of Syrian and Iraqi Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts.” The project explores the prospects of (re)constructing and rehabilitating cultural heritage sites affected by armed conflicts in Syria and Iraq.
Simon Mabon is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, UK and the Director of SEPAD, the Sectarianism, Proxies and De-Sectarianization Project, which looks at the way in which the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran is shaping sectarianism and politics across the Middle East. This current phase of research will produce two single authored monographs. One of them, Houses built on sand: Violence, sectarianism and revolution in the Middle East, will be published by Manchester University Press in early 2020.
Toby Matthiesen is a Senior Research Fellow in the International Relations of the Middle East at Oxford University, UK. He holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London. His research interests include the modern history of the Gulf States, Sunni-Shia relations, and the legacies of the Cold War in the Middle East. He is the author of Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn’t (Stanford University Press), and The Other Saudis: Shiism, Dissent and Sectarianism (Cambridge University Press).
Yasir Suleiman is President and Provost of Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, and an Emeritus Professor of Modern Arabic Studies at Cambridge University. Professor Suleiman is Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, formerly Head of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and Founding Director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies. His many published works include Language and Society in the Middle East and North Africa (2015), A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East (2004).
Winter School
