To sign up for this forum, you must register in advance by sending an e-mail message to confirmaciones@casaarabe.es

If you would like to receive a certificate of attendance when the forum comes to an end, you must specify this when you sign up to register. In order to receive the certificate, you will have to attend at least six of the sessions (the forum consists of eight), and you must sign the attendance sheet at the beginning of each session. This attendance sheet will be available to the public at the Auditorium entrance.

Gouda Abdel-Khalek is a former Minister of Solidarity and Social Justice in the government of the post-January 25 revolution in Egypt. He is currently a professor of Economics at the Cairo University’s School of Economics. He has also worked as an international consultant for the United Nations and a top-level expert at the World Bank. He was a Fulbright researcher at Johns Hopkins University and a visiting professor at UCLA, USC and Rutgers University. His publications include World Economic Crises, Macropolicies for Poverty Reduction, Domestic Debt Sustainability, The Political Economy of Income Distribution in Egypt and Stabilization and Adjustment Policies and Programs. His research interests include globalization and financial crises, macroeconomic policies to reduce poverty, debt sustainability, economic reform and industrialization policies, and democracy and development.

Khalid Abu-Ismail is the head of the Economic Development and Poverty Section at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA). This section focuses on supporting Arab countries to measure poverty and create macroeconomic and fiscal policies that lead to inclusive development, producing two of the most important regional publications by the UNESCWA. From 2002 to 2012, he was a policy advisor in the Arab countries of the UNDP on macroeconomic policies, employment, inequality and reducing poverty. He has authored and been the main co-author of more than 40 publications and technical documents by the UN oriented towards policies, including: Arab Reports on Development Challenges (UNDP, 2009 and 2012), Arab Middle Class (UNESCWA, 2014), and Rethinking Economic Growth (ILO and UNDP, 2012). Other areas of interest in his research are: macroeconomic fiscal policies, human development, employment, food security, and conflicts and development.

Mohamed Al-Daradji is an Iraqi-Dutch film director. He studied theater in Iraq and film directing in England. He is known for his dramatic films, which revolve around political affairs in the Middle East and their effects on inter-personal relationships. Al-Daradji was back in the spotlight in 2009 because of his drama Son of Babylon, which premiered at the International Film Festival of the Middle East (now known as the Abu Dhabi Film Festival). The film made its worldwide premiere at the Berlinale in 2010 (International Film Festival of Berlin) and earned him the Berlin Amnesty and Peace Prize, the NETPAC Award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and the Middle East Filmmaker Award given by Variety magazine. He was given a Special Mention at the International Film Festival of Edinburgh.

Madawi Al-Rasheed is a visiting professor at the Middle East Centre of the London School of Economics (LSE). Prior to that, she was a professor of Social Anthropology at King’s College in London and a visiting professor at the Middle East Institute of Singapore’s National University. Her research focuses on history, society, religion and politics in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Christian minorities from the Middle East in Great Britain, Arab migration, Islamist movements, State and gender relations, and Islamic modernism. Her publications include An Arabian Oasis (I.B. Tauris 1991), (Palgrave 2004), Dying for Faith: Religiously Motivated Violence in the Contemporary World (I.B. Tauris, 2009),  Demystifying the Caliphate (Hurst, 2012),  A Masculine State: Gender, Politics and Religion in Saudi Arabia (CUP, 2013) and Muted Modernists: The Struggle over Divine Politics in Saudi Arabia (Hurst, 2015).

Haizam Amirah Fernández is the main researcher at the Real Instituto Elcano and an associate professor at the Instituto de Empresa (IE). Holder of a bachelor’s degree from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and a Master’s degree in Arab studies and Political Science from Georgetown University in Washington, DC, he is a Fulbright Commission scholarship recipient. He spent part of his studies at the Free University of Brussels and at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has taught at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) and the universities of Georgetown, Saint Louis, CEU San Pablo and Barcelona. He has worked at the United Nations (New York) and at Human Rights Watch (Washington DC).

Zoulikha Bouabdellah was born in Moscow but grew up in Algiers and moved to France in 1993, where she earned a degree in Fine Arts at the Cérgy-Pontoise Advanced National School of Arts in 2002. Her art installations, drawings, videos and photography deal with the effects of globalization and question its portrayals with subversive humor. In 2003, she directed the video Let’s Dance (Dansons), in which she created a fusion of the archetypes about French and Algerian cultures, performing a belly dance to the tune of La Marseillaise. Since 2007, Bouabdellah’s work has mainly focused on the status of women. Her work forms part of art collections including those at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art (Doha), the Ludwig Foundation Museum of Modern Art (Vienna) and the Sindika Dokolo Foundation (Luanda). She has received awards and distinctions which include the  Capital Art Prize (2009), the Meurice Contemporary Art Prize (2008) and Villa Medicis Hors les Murs (2005).

Fatemah Farag is the founder and director of Welad Elbalad Media Services LTD, a company devoted to the development of community-based media and media excellence in Egypt. She is also a Nieman Fellow at the Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, the MENA Director of the WAN-IFRA Program for Women in the News and a board member of the World Editors Forum (WEF). Before that, she was the editor-in-chief and founder of the English edition of the newspaper Al Masry Al Youm and divided her career between writing and the journalism of training and education. Before working at the Regional Office of the Washington Post, she was the assistant chief editor for Al-Ahram Weekly and a reporter at the Middle East Times - Egypt, as well as working independently for many different local and international news organizations.  As an educator, she has provided training at several organizations, including the European Union, the British Council, the Library of Alexandria and the American University of Cairo.

Louise Fawcett is a professor of International Relations and head of that department at Oxford University, as well as a Wilfrid Knapp Fellow and Politics tutor at St. Catherine’s College. Fawcett works on topics in International Relations, particularly the history, politics and international relations of developing countries and international institutions. Her main publications include Regionalism in World Politics (authored with Andrew Hurrell), The Third World Beyond the Cold War (with Yezid Sayigh), Regionalism and Governance in the Americas (with Monica Serrano) and International Relations of the Middle East (3rd edition in 2013). She is a member of the International Advisory Board for the international affairs journal of Chatham House and the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS).

Jean-Pierre Filiu, a historian and Arabist, has been a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Sciences Po’s School of International Affairs in Paris (PSIA) since 2006. He has been a visiting professor at the Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and Georgetown University’s Foreign Service School (SFS). He has been an advisor to the Prime Minister (2000-2002), to the Minister of Defense (1991-1993) and to the Minister of the Interior (1990-1991). Filiu was a career diplomat from 1988 to 2006, after humanitarian missions in Afghanistan (1986) and Lebanon (1983-84). He was stationed in Amman, after becoming the Deputy Chief of Mission in Damascus and Tunis. His book Apocalypse in Islam (2011) was given the most important award at the French History Convention. Other works of his include:  Arab Revolution, ten lessons from the democratic uprising (2011), Gaza, a History (2014) and From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab counter-revolution and its Jihadi legacy (2015).

Ibrahim Fraihat is an international professor of conflict resolution at the Graduate Studies Institute of Doha and Georgetown University. Before that, he was a foreign policy researcher at the Brookings Institution and taught international conflict resolution at George Washington University and George Mason University. His latest book is titled Unfinished Revolutions: Yemen, Libya and Tunisia after the Arab Spring (Yale University Press, 2016). Fraihat earned his PhD in conflict analysis and resolution at George Mason University in 2006 and has been a consultant for international organizations that work on conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction in the Arab world, placing a special emphasis on conflict management and mediation, transitions, national reconciliation and institutional reform.

Hassan Hakimian is the director of and a professor at the Middle East Institute, which forms part of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. His research revolves around the MENA economies, and more specifically human resources and demographic change, labor markets, inclusive growth and the economics of the Arab uprisings. He is the author of Labour Transfer and Economic Development (1990) and a co-editor of Trade Policy and Economic Integration in MENA (2003). He is a founding member and is currently the president of the Iranian International Economic Association (IEA) and a member of the Advisory Committee of the Economic Research Forum in Cairo. He is the founder and an editor of the series Routledge Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa, which he launched in 2003.

Salwa Hamrouni is a professor of Law at the University of Tunis and executive secretary of the International Constitutional Law Academy. She gives classes and conferences on human rights, international institutions and international human rights protection, and she is an expert on civil education. She is an active member of the board of directors of the Tunisian Association of Constitutional Law and has taken part in reviewing constitutional bills drafted by the Constituent Assembly of Tunisia. She is the author of a thesis on bioethics and international law, a dictionary of electoral terminology and several articles about the democratic transition in Tunisia, constitutional institutions and human rights. She has also authored reports on justice and transitions, constitutional equality and gender equality, freedom of expression in Tunisia and decentralization for several international organizations.

Miriam R. Lowi is professor of comparative and Middle East politics at The College of New Jersey. A native of Montreal, Canada, she received her B.A.  (History & Economics) from McGill University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. (Politics) from Princeton University. Her research and writing focus primarily on the intersections between natural resources and political behavior.  She has written extensively on conflict over scarce water among adversarial states in the Middle East, and on oil and instability in Algeria. Her current project – for which she was named “Carnegie Scholar” -- examines the impact of oil wealth on the way Gulf Arabs live as Muslims today. Her major publications include: Oil Wealth and the Poverty of Politics: Algeria Compared (Cambridge University Press: 2009) y Water and Power: the Politics of a Scarce Resource in the Jordan River Basin (Cambridge University Press: 1993/95).

Hibaaq Osman is the founder of Karama, an organization that has worked for more than 12 years to put an end to violence against women and achieve sustainable, inclusive peace and democracy in the Arab region. Karama’s guiding principle is to ensure that the strategies which affect women in the region respond not only to the needs of women in the real world, but also for them to be managed by women and become true representatives of the community. The goal is to place women in the Arab region at the core of the humanitarian response, to prevent and resolve conflicts and to promote women’s participation in public life. Named one of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world, Hibaaq formerly served as a member of the Advisory Group of the UN Global Civil Society and is currently on the board of Donor Direct Action.

Gianluca Parolin is an associate professor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations and leads the Governance Project at the Aga Khan University in London. Prior to that, he worked at the American University of Cairo in the Law Department, after having been a researcher and, during his post-doctoral period, working in the Department of Law at the University of Turin, his alma mater, where he earned a Law degree (with honors) and later a PhD in Public Law. His research interests revolve around regional governance and constitutional arrangements in the Middle East, citizenship in the Arab world and the general paths followed by legal systems in countries with a Muslim majority. His publications include Citizenship in the Arab World, IMISCOE Research Series (Amsterdam AUP: 2009).

Mayssoun Sukarieh is the coordinator of the Master’s degree program in Middle East Political Economics at King’s College. She has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master’s degree from the American University of Beirut. Since then, she has given Anthropology and Development Studies courses at universities in the Arab region (American University of Beirut, American University of Cairo) and the United States (Columbia and Brown). Her research interests revolve around youth, education, development and social movements in the Arab region, with a particular interest in studying the political, economic, cultural and social structures and processes which link this region of complex and contradictory features to the global political economy. Her first book, Youth Rising? The Politics of Youth in the Global Economy (co-authored with Stuart Tannock) was published in 2015.