Ali Fathollah-Nejad
The AUB Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI) is delighted to welcome Ali Fathollah-Nejad as an Associate Fellow. Ali, PhD, is a German-Iranian political scientist focusing on Iran, the Middle East, and the post-unipolar world order. He is the author of the much-acclaimed book Iran in an Emerging New World Order: From Ahmadinejad to Rouhani.
At IFI, he will be publishing a monthly brief titled "
Iran in Focus" (which was previously published under the name "Iran 1400 Brief" by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom Middle East); besides having other research activities on Iran and the Middle East, within the developing Regional and International Affairs Program.
"In the line of the efforts to dynamize its international program, IFI is very glad to welcome Dr. Ali to its team. As one of the renowned scholars on and from Iran, Dr. Fathollah-Nejad will undoubtedly offer our Institute valuable expertise and network, tackling a topic that will remain strategic for the Middle East for many decades ahead."
- Dr. Joseph Bahout, IFI Director
Ali holds a PhD in International Relations from the Department of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (SOAS) and was the winner of the 2016/17 post-doctoral fellowship of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Iran Project. He is also an affiliated researcher with the Centre d’Études de la Coopération Internationale et du Développement (CECID) at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Freie Universität (FU) Berlin’s Center for Middle Eastern and North African Politics and the Afro–Middle East Centre (AMEC), South Africa’s think-tank specialized on the Middle East. More recently, he was a Senior Lecturer on the Middle East and Comparative Politics at the University of Tübingen and an adjunct Assistant Professor in the PhD program of Qatar University’s Gulf Studies Center. Ali is also the former Iran expert of the Brookings Institution in Doha (BDC, 2017–20) and the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP, 2015–18). In 2020, he published two monographs: The Islamic Republic of Iran Four Decades On: The 2017/18 Protests Amid a Triple Crisis and The Politics of Culture in Times of Rapprochement: European Cultural and Academic Exchange with Iran (2015–16).
"I'm very honored to join the excellent team at IFI-AUB, indeed a most unique and arguably the leading academic institution in the Middle East, at this critical juncture of regional and international developments, in which Iran plays a critical role. I hope that my work will contribute to a more robust understanding on these critical and policy-relevant issues."
- Dr. Ali Fathollah-Nejad, Associate Fellow