CIRS Monthly Dialogue: What Arab Authoritarianism Tells Us About the World

Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer specializing in international law and human rights, returns to GU-Q as a Practitioner-in-Residence for the academic year. She will teach Palestine and the Law and Negotiation and Organizational Conflict, offering students a practitioner’s lens on diplomacy, accountability, and resistance. A former legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team and fellow at Stanford and Harvard, she is a frequent commentator on Palestine and international law in global media. 

Dana El Kurd is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Richmond, in Richmond, Virginia, USA. She specializes in Palestinian and Arab politics, particularly on topics related to mobilization, public opinion, and international intervention. Her first book, titled Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine, was published in January 2020 with Oxford University Press. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Global Studies Quarterly, PS: Political Science & Politics, and Democratization, as well as media outlets such as The Nation, Foreign Policy, Jewish Currents, Financial Times, and more. El Kurd is a senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington, and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Palestine Studies as well as the Board of Directors of Jewish Currents. 

Alexei Abrahams is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, Qatar. His research examines information manipulation and cybersecurity using big data and social science methods, with a current focus on designing digital observatories to assess the health of media ecosystems. His work has appeared in journals including Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Political Science Research & Methods, and International Journal of Communication, and has informed reporting in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Reuters, and CBC News.Previously, he served as Digital Lead for the Canadian Media Ecosystems Observatory at McGill University and held research fellowships at Harvard, the University of Toronto, Princeton University, and UC San Diego. He earned his PhD in Economics from Brown University and frequently consults for the World Bank.

Yasmeen Mekawy is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in Qatar. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago, specializing in the comparative politics of the Middle East and North Africa. Her research and teaching focus on social movements and revolution, digital media and popular culture, and the politics of emotion. She examines how emotions mobilize and demobilize collective action, and how affect circulates through social media and cultural forms. Her work has been published in Mediterranean Politics. She is currently working on her book project on the role of affect and emotion in the making and unmaking of Egypt’s 2011 revolution. affect circulates through social media and cultural forms. Her work has been published in Mediterranean Politics. She is currently working on her book project on the role of affect and emotion in the making and unmaking of Egypt’s 2011 revolution.

Abdullah Al-Arian is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University in Qatar where
he specializes in the modern Middle East and the study of Islamic social movements. He is the
author of Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt, editor of Football in
the Middle East: State, Society, and the Beautiful Game and co-editor of the forthcoming Global
Histories and Practices of Islamophobia. He is also editor of the Critical Currents in Islam page
on the Jadaliyya e-zine.