Experts

Senior Fellows

Mohammed Moussa
Senior Fellow

Dr. Mohammed Moussa is Senior Fellow at Demos Tunisia. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University. He was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Mohammed completed his doctorate at the University of Exeter. His publications include a monograph on the political thought of Shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazali (2015) and articles in Journal of North African Studies, Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research, Protest and Annals of Japan Association for Middle East Studies.

Khalil Fadl Osman
Senior Fellow and Program Director

Dr. Khalil Fadl Osman is Senior Fellow and Director of the Arab Hirak Program at Demos Tunisia. He boasts career experience spanning academia, diplomacy (namely United Nations) and journalism. He worked for 15 years in different media and political affairs capacities at the UN, serving in Sudan, Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Somalia. Dr. Osman has taught at Indiana University (USA) and the American University of Kurdistan (Iraq). He has also worked for the BBC, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Canada International. Dr. Osman has a PhD in Politics from the University of Exeter. His publications include the forthcoming co-edited book Yemen at the Crossroads: Crisis and Reconstruction (Routledge, 2025) and Sectarianism in Iraq: The Making of State and Nation Since 1920 (Routledge, 2014).

Larbi Sadiki
Senior Fellow and Director

Prof. Larbi Sadiki is Senior Fellow and Director of Demos-Tunisia. He is an internationally-recognized expert on Arab democratization who has researched and published extensively on the topic. Amongst his books are The Search for Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counter-Discourses (Columbia University Press, 2004), Rethinking Arab Democratization: Elections without Democracy (OUP, 2009), and the Routledge Handbook of Middle East Politics: Interdisciplinary Inscriptions (Routledge, 2020), and most recently, the co-authored Revolution and Democracy in Tunisia: A Century of Protestscapes (OUP, 2024). He is Editor of the book series Routledge Studies on Middle East Democratization and Government and Editor-in-Chief of the Brill journal Protest. His blogs, which circulated widely during the Arab Spring, appeared in Aljazeera English. He has been a fellow with the Heinrich Boll Foundation, Carnegie Middle East, Brookings Doha, the Middle East Council on Global Affairs and has been an academic at the Australian National University, the University of Exeter, the University of Westminster, and Qatar University.

Layla Saleh
Senior Fellow and Director of Research

Dr. Layla Saleh is Senior Fellow and Director of Research at Demos-Tunisia. She also heads the Women in Democratic Sustainability Program. A political scientist by training, she specializes in Arab politics, protest movements, and democratization. Her publications include the book US Hard Power in the Arab World: Resistance, the Syrian Uprising, and the US War on Terror (Routledge, 2017), COVID-19 and Risk Society Across the MENA Region: Assessing Governance, Democracy, and Inequality (IB Tauris, 2022, co-edited with Larbi Sadiki), Revolution and Democracy in Tunisia: A Century of Protestscapes (co-authored; OUP, 2024) as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. She has taught at Qatar University’s Department of International Affairs, and is currently Research Fellow at the Center For Relational Studies on Global Crises, Chiba University (Japan). She is also Associate Editor of the Brill journal Protest.

Fellows

Saerom Han
Fellow

Dr. Saerom Han is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Sookmyung Women’s University in South Korea. Her research explores global governance, security, development, and social movements in Middle East and North Africa. She is the author of Unemployment and Resistance in Tunisia: The Democracy-Security Nexus (Edinburgh University Press) and has published in academic journals, including ILR Review, Security Dialogue, and Social Movement Studies.