Scholars

Former Correspondent in Vienna for Agence France-Presse News Agency
An American who has worked for Agence France-Presse news agency since 1980 with postings in Paris, Bangkok, Kuwait, Sarajevo, Bonn, Berlin and Vienna, Adler covered the uprising in Burma in 1988, the reconstruction of Kuwait after the first Gulf War, the war in Bosnia, the moving of the German capital from Bonn to Berlin and the fall of Mobutu in Zaire. He is currently a Public Policy Scholar at t...
Senior Fellow, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding, Georgetown University
My focus on women, gender, and feminisms in Islam and Muslim societies for more than three decades has combined teaching and scholarship, public intellectual work, consulting, and activism. For even longer I have been a feminist. I have lived, contributed, and studied feminisms in many locations. For many this would raise questions of belonging—of positioning as insider or outsider and atten...
Middle East Specialist and Former Washington Post Correspondent
David B. Ottaway received a BA from Harvard, magna cum laude, in 1962 and a PhD from Columbia University in 1972. He worked 35 years for The Washington Post as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and Southern Europe and later as a national security and investigative reporter in Washington before retiring in 2006. He has won numerous awards for his reporting at home and abroad and wa...
Marina Ottaway is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and a long-time analyst of political transformations in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. She is working on a project at the Wilson Center about the countries of the Arab Spring and Iraq. Ottaway joined the Wilson Center after 14 years at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, during which she played a central role in...
Lawyer
Falah Shakarm is a lawyer and currently the Iraqi Project Coordinator for WADI, an international NGO working for empowering civil society and human rights, where he manages projects about women and youth and campaign to stop female genital mutilation on an Iraq and Middle East level. In 2013 he wrote the first draft of law for combating FGM which was submitted to the Iraqi Parliaments. Falah serve...
Co-Founder, Aie Serve
Abbas Sibai is from Beirut Lebanon, part of Leaders of Democracy Fellows Program at Maxwell School, Syracuse University NY. He is passionate about creating new initiatives related to active youth participation, environment and health issues. Lately he developed "Live Love Beirut" a crowd source platform for youth mobilization in Lebanon. He is also Program Manager and Communications cons...
Journalist and Author/Editor of eight books, most recently editor of "The Islamists Are Coming: Who They Really Are"
Robin Wright is a journalist, author and foreign policy analyst. She is currently a USIP Senior Fellow-Wilson Center Distinguished Scholar. Her projects explore new trends in the Islamic world--the Arab revolts, the rise of political Islam and the counter-jihad against extremism.  She also identifies issues that will define the next decade, when the Middle East’s transformation will be a maj...