International Advisory Board
Dr. Amor Boubakri is Associate Professor at the University of Sousse. He has published in Tunisia and internationally on issues related to democracy, good governance, constitution and public finance. He also contributed to several academic programs at universities in the Arab region, Europe and the US. Boubakri has international professional experience with the UN and other international organizations in Asia, Africa and America. Boubakri was also member of the National Commission of Political Reform in 2011 and was member of the National Commission of Human Rights in Tunisia (2012-2025).
Prof. miriam cooke is Braxton Craven Professor Emerita of Arab Cultures at Duke University. Her writings have focused on the intersection of gender and war in modern Arabic literature, Arab women writers’ construction of Islamic feminism, contemporary Syrian and Khaliji cultures, and global Muslim networks. In addition to co-editing five volumes, she is the author of several monographs that include War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (1987), Women and the War Story (1997); Women Claim Islam (2001); Dissident Syria (2007), Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (2014) and Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience and the Syrian Revolution (2017).
Dr. Mariela Cuadro is a sociologist from the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina. Currently, she is a researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET). She is a also professor at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Her recent publications include “Teaching/Learning through ‘Black Earth Rising’: Poststructural, Decolonial, and Feminist Readings”, in International Studies Perspectives (2022) and “Under the Western Sign. Argentina’s Relations with the Middle East during Mauricio Macri’s Government,” in M. Tawil and E. Brun (eds), Latin American Relations with the Middle East. Foreign Policy in Times of Crisis (Routledge, 2022).
Dr. Assem Dandashly is a tenured Assistant Professor at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. His research focuses on the EU’s relations with the southern neighbourhood – Middle East and North Africa (MENA). His publications have appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals in EU studies such as the Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of European Integration, Comparative European Politics, and Mediterranean Politics, in comparative politics such as Democratization, in international relations such as The International Spectator, International Politics and Global Affairs and with leading book publishers such as Routledge, Palgrave.
Dr. Leon Goldsmith is Senior Lecturer in the Politics Programme at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He works on Middle Eastern and comparative politics, identity politics, youth politics, political participation, political culture, institutions and comparative political systems. His main geographic areas of research are Syria and the Levant, and Oman and the Arab Gulf states. Leon’s current theoretical interests explore the ideas of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi.
Dr. Mohamed El Hachimi is a senior research fellow at the CERSS (Centre d’études et de recherches en sciences sociales) in Rabat and a professor of Political Science. He also served as a senior advisor to the president of the National Human Rights Council of Morocco since 2019. He has also published several articles (in English, French, and Arabic) on democratization, security and justice sector reform, civil society, new forms of activism in the Maghreb. He is the head of the international research group on “State, society and dynamics of political change in the MENA region” created in 2017.
Dr. Daniela Huber is Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department of Roma Tre University. She is scientific advisor of the Mediterranean, Middle East and Africa Programme at IAI (Istituto Affari Internazionali), which she had led from 2019 to 2022, and co-editor of the journal The International Spectator. Her researches focuses on democratization in the Middle East and North Africa.
Prof. John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and the WZB (Berlin), and recently taught at Beijing Foreign Studies University. He is renowned globally for his work on democracy and is the author of many books including The Life and Death of Democracy (2009), Democracy and Media Decadence (2013), The New Despotism (2020). He has contributed to The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Times Literary Supplement, Financial Times, The Guardian, Die Zeit, Hindustan Times and the South China Morning Post. His latest book is The Shortest History of Democracy (2022), which is so far published in 15 languages.
Dr. Andrea Flores Khalil is a professor of North African literature and culture at the City University of New York. She is a former Fulbright Scholar Tunisia and served as Director of the Centre d’etudes maghrebines a Tunis. She is the author of several books about North Africa and is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of North African Studies.
Prof. Eberhard Kienle is Directeur de recherche (Research Professor) at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris and teaches politics at SciencesPo Paris. He previously served as director of the Institut de recherches et d’études sur les mondes arabes et musulmans (IREMAM) in Aix-en-Provence, and director of the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo, French Near East Institute) in Beirut. His publications include Ba’th versus Ba’th: The conflict between Syria and Iraq, 1968-1989 (London, I.B. Tauris, 1990), A Grand Delusion: Democracy and Economic Reform in Egypt (London, I.B. Tauris, 2001), and Egypt: A Fragile Power (Abingdon/ New York, N.Y., Routledge, 2022). With Nadine Sika he co-edited The Arab Uprisings: Transforming and Challenging State Power (London, I.B.Tauris, 2015).
Prof. Bahgat Korany is Professor of International Relations and Political Economy at the American University in Cairo, and Founding Director of the AUC Forum (2006-2020). He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Montreal, an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Co-founder and first Director of the Inter- University Consortium of Middle Eastern Studies (Canada), and recipient of the International Studies Association Distinguished Global South Scholar Award for Life Contributions (2015).
Prof. Elena Korosteleva is Professor of Politics and Global Sustainable Development, and Director of the Institute for Global Sustainable Development, at the University of Warwick. She is also Co-Founder of the Oxford Belarus Observatory (2020-23) supporting democratic change in Belarus; Principal Investigator for the GCRF-funded COMPASS (2017-22) and COMPASS+ (2022-23) projects focusing on capacity-building in Central Eurasia; and COI for the SHAPEDEM-EU project (2022-25). Her recent work includes Resilient Communities of Central Eurasia (Taylor & Francis, 2023, forthcoming); Belarus in the XXI Century: Between Dictatorship and Democracy (Routledge 2023, forthcoming), ‘The War in Ukraine: Putin and the Multi-order World’, Contemporary Security Policy, 43(3) 2022: 466-81 (with T. Flockhart); and Resilience in EU and International Institutions (with T. Flockhart, Routledge 2020).
Dr Saudia Levoyer is a professor and journalist working at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Ecuador. Her academic research focuses on freedom of information and public opinion. Her most recent book is titled: Ecuador: Why are we as we are? (in Spanish, in Ecuador: por qué estamos como estamos?). Her areas of research interest include democracy.
Prof. Michelle Pace is Professor in Global Studies at the Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University in Denmark and has published widely on EU-MENA relations and democratization in the MENA region. She is currently Danish Lead Partner on the Horizon Europe SHAPEDEM-EU project on Rethinking and Reshaping the EU’s democracy support in its Eastern and Southern Neighbourhood (2022 –2025).
Prof. Keiko Sakai is Professor, Faculty of Law and Economics and Dean of the Center for Relational Studies on Global Crisis at Chiba University in Tokyo. Her work includes Iraq and the US (2002), Structure of Ruling System of the Regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq (2003). Her publications in Japanese include the recent seven-volume series on Global Relational Studies (Iwanami, 2020), awarded with Consortium of Area Studies Award- Prize for academic project in 2022. She is a co-author of Iraq Since Invasion (Routledge, 2020), and worked as a President of Japan Association of International Relations (2012-14).
Dr. David Mednicoff is trained as a lawyer and political scientist and holds a BA from Princeton, and MA, JD and PhD (Political Science) degrees from Harvard. He is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and the School of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA, where he also serves as Chair of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies. His teaching and publications focus on intersections of comparative legal ideas, institutions, politics, and public policy in the Middle East, and especially, the Arab Gulf and North Africa. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the politics of the rule of law across the Arab world, and a new project on diverse regional legal policy approaches to the global refugee crisis.
Dr. Lucia Sorbera is Senior Lecturer and Chair of Discipline of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of Sydney. She has published widely in history of Egyptian feminism, women’s political activism, and cultural productions in the Arab world. She is currently writing a monograph for UC Press, tentatively titled Biography of a Revolution. The Feminist Roots of the Arab Spring in Egypt. Recent works include Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures. Beyond Norms and Transgression from the Abbasids to the Present. Day (I.B. Tauris, 2021), which she co-edited with Aymon Kreil and Serena Tolino.
Prof. Laurence Whitehead is a Senior Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford University and a leading international scholar in the field of democratization. Amongst his books are Democratization: Theory and Experience (OUP, 2002), and Latin America: A New Interpretation, (Palgrave, 2006 second revised updated edition 2010). He is editor of an Oxford University Press series, ‘Studies in Democratization’.
Prof. Andrea Gawrich is a professor of political science and holds the chair for International Integration at the Institute for Political Science, Justus Liebig University Giessen (Germany). She is the coordinator of the EU Horizon project “Rethinking and Reshaping the EU’s Democracy Support in Its Eastern and Southern Neighbourhoods”, and principal investigator of the DFG-funded research project on post-Soviet regional organizations. Her research focuses on European Integration with regard to the EU, OSCE and Council of Europe. She has published in Journal of Common Market Studies, Post-Soviet Affairs, Caucasus Survey, Journal of East European Politics, Society and Culture, and Journal of International Peace and Organization, among other journals.
Prof. Iwasaki Erina is Professor in the Dept. of French Studies, of the Faculty of Foreign Studies of Sophia University in Tokyo. She specializes in Middle East and North African studies, in particular Egyptian and Tunisian socio-economics with a special focus on development and urban-rural relations. She has written extensively on these subjects, both in Japanese and English. Her English publications include Sustainable Water Solutions in the Western Desert, Egypt: Dakhla Oasis, Co-Edited with Abdelazim Negm and Salwa Elbeih (Springer, 2020) and Rashda: The Birth and Growth of an Egyptian Oasis Village, co-authored with Hiroshi Kato (Brill, 2016)
