MERIP provides critical, alternative reporting and analysis, focusing on state power, political economy and social hierarchies as well as popular struggles and the role of US policy in the region. MERIP seeks to reach academics, journalists, non-governmental and governmental organizations and informed citizens who want knowledgeable analysis and critical resources about contemporary political developments. Informed by scholarship and research, MERIP is a curated platform for critical analysis and discussion that brings informed perspectives to a broader audience.
The Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) was established in 1971 to educate and inform the public about contemporary Middle East affairs. A registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, MERIP publishes a quarterly online magazine, Middle East Report, as well as frequent articles and educational primers on its website.
Middle East Report is the best periodical (in English) on the Middle East—bar none.Rashid Khalidi
Middle East Report is the best periodical (in English) on the Middle East—bar none.Rashid Khalidi
Staff
Mandy Terc, Executive Director
Mandy Terc is the executive director of the Middle East Research and Information Project. Previously, she served as founding director of the Sheikh Faisal Center for Entrepreneurship in the Middle East at DePaul University where she developed programs to strengthen Qatar’s entrepreneurial capacity and to connect entrepreneurs in Doha and Chicago. Terc has written extensively about the region’s new generation of entrepreneurs and has conducted 18 months of field research on entrepreneurship in Syria. She speaks fluent Arabic and holds a PhD from the University of Michigan.
Katie Natanel, Executive Editor
Katie Natanel is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. Her research explores how gender and sexuality shape—and are shaped by—political participation and mobilization, conflict and political violence, and political emotions. She is particularly interested in micro-politics, or the politics of everyday life, and psycho-social dynamics. Her recent book project, Sustaining Conflict: Apathy and Domination in Israel-Palestine, was awarded the 2017 Feminist and Women’s Studies Association (UK & Ireland) Book Prize. Now her research has shifted focus to decolonization, in particular feminist decolonial politics and decolonial ecologies. She is a member of the Exeter Decolonising Network steering group. She joined MERIP as executive editor in February 2022.
Michelle Woodward, Managing Editor and Photo Editor
Michelle Woodward is the managing editor of MERIP. She also serves as photo editor, a position she has held since 2003. Previously she served as media coordinator, administrative assistant and intern for MERIP. She holds an MS in Comparative Media Studies from MIT. A scholar of the history of photography and photojournalism in the Middle East, she has published in History of Photography, Photographies and Jerusalem Quarterly and the edited collection Film and Risk. While based in Beirut she was editor of Jadaliyya’s Photography Page from 2012 until 2017.
Michael Kaplan, Staff Editor
Michael Kaplan is a PhD student in anthropology at the George Washington University. His research explores Islamic reform and revival communities in Turkey, with a focus on transnationalism, migration and mobility.
Karisa Gingerich, Website Assistant
Pádraigín O'Flynn, Social Media Coordinator
Pádraigín O’Flynn is in her final semester of undergraduate studies in political science and economics at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.
Board of Directors
Paul Silverstein, Board Chair
Paul Silverstein is professor of anthropology at Reed College. He is the author of Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation (Indiana University Press, 2004), Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa, edited with Ussama Makdisi (Indiana University Press, 2006) and Bourdieu in the Field: Colonial Politics, Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments, edited with Jane Goodman (University of Nebraska Press, 2009).
Kaveh Ehsani
Kaveh Ehsani is assistant professor of international studies at DePaul University and a contributing editor of Middle East Report.
Adam Hanieh
Adam Hanieh is Professor in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London. His research focuses on political economy, with an emphasis on the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Vickie Langohr
Vickie Langohr is associate professor at College of the Holy Cross. Her teaching and research interests are in Middle East politics, women’s rights and democratization.
Shana Marshall
Shana Marshall is associate director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and chair of MERIP’s editorial committee. Her research focuses on the political economy of the military in Egypt, Jordan and the UAE.
Lee O'Brien
Lee O’Brien began her career working for various local and international human rights and research NGOs in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine. Between 1992 and 2000 she headed UNRWA’s research office in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and then moved to United Nations headquarters in New York where she was deputy director of the Middle East desk in the Department of Political Affairs from 2003 to her retirement in 2014. Lee is a long-time MERIP contributor and supporter and author of American Jewish Organizations and Israel (Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington D.C., 1986). She studied sociology at UC Berkeley and has a Masters in Contemporary Arab Studies from Georgetown University.
Mary Sexton
Mary Sexton served as the Director of Major Donors and Planned Giving at Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) from 2002-2021. Prior to MSF, Mary was Director of National Accounts at Simon and Schuster and Random House. She has an MA in journalism/international communications from Northern Illinois University.
Nabil Al-Tikriti
Nabil Al-Tikriti is associate professor of Middle East history at the University of Mary Washington and and vice-chair of MERIP’s editorial committee. He was a member of the MSF/Doctors Without Borders USA Board of Directors from 2011 to 2017, culminating as vice president in 2016-17. He has also served as a consultant, election monitor and relief worker at a number of field locations in Europe, Asia and Africa.
Mandy Terc
Mandy Terc is the executive director of MERIP.
Editorial Committee
Ayça Alemdaroğlu - Stanford University
Ayça Alemdaroğlu is the Associate Director of the Program on Turkey and Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She is a political sociologist, focusing on social and political inequality and change in Turkey and the Middle East. Ayça’s recent work examines youth politics, and authoritarianism. In “Governing the youth in times of dissent: Essay competitions, politics of history and affective pedagogies” (forthcoming), she examines the politics of history and emotional tactics the Justice and Development Party (AKP) uses in its effort to control, administer and recruit youth. She also served as a guest editor for MERIP’s Fall 2018 issue, “Confronting the New Turkey.”
Lori Allen - SOAS University of London
Lori Allen is reader in anthropology at SOAS University of London. She is the author of The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine (Stanford, 2013) and A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine (Stanford, 2020).
Mona Atia - George Washington University
Mona Atia is associate professor of Geography and International Affairs at the George Washington University and director of the Middle East Studies program. She is a critical development geographer whose areas of expertise include Islamic charity, philanthropy, housing/urban development, the production of poverty knowledge and the spatial politics of marginalization. She is author of Building a House in Heaven: Pious Neoliberalism and Islamic Charity in Egypt (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Elif Babül- Mount Holyoke College
Elif Babül is associate professor of anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. Her publications include Bureaucratic Intimacies: Translating Human Rights in Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2017), as well as a number of articles in both English and Turkish in journals such as American Ethnologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review and New Perspectives on Turkey; as well as edited volumes such as Diaspora and Memory: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics.
Jessica Barnes - University of South Carolina
Jessica is currently an assistant professor in the department of geography and School of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of South Carolina. Her work focuses on the culture and politics of resource use and environmental change in the Middle East. Her publications include Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt (Duke University Press, 2014), Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change (coedited with Michael Dove, Yale University Press, 2015), and articles in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Social Studies of Science, Critique of Anthropology, and Society and Space. She is currently working on a book that draws on ethnographic and archival research to examine food security in Egypt and the longstanding identification of security with self-sufficiency in wheat and bread.
Graham Cornwell - George Washington University
Graham Cornwell is a professorial lecturer in Middle East studies and assistant dean for research at George Washington University. His research focuses on the transnational history of food and drink, with particular emphasis on the social, cultural and political aspects of changing patterns of consumption in the modern Middle East. He is working on a book manuscript titled Sweetening the Pot: Empire, Tea, and Sugar in Morocco.
Muriam Haleh Davis - University of California, Santa Cruz
Muriam Haleh Davis is an assistant professor in the history department at UCSC where she teaches classes on post-colonial North Africa, Arab thought and French empire. Her current book project investigates how colonial ideas of Islam underpinned the construction of economic planning initiatives in Algeria—from the liberal capitalist system envisioned by French planners to the socialist policies introduced by the independent Algerian state. She has recently published articles in The Journal of Modern History and The Journal of European Integration and she co-edited North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions and Culture (Bloomsbury, 2018). In addition to MERIP, she also contributes to the Maghreb Page on Jadaliyya as a co-editor.
Lisa Hajjar - University of California, Santa Barbara
Lisa Hajjar is a professor of sociology at UCSB. Her work focuses mainly on issues relating to law and conflict, specifically the enforcement of international human rights and humanitarian laws in the context of armed conflicts. Her research addresses military courts and occupations, torture and targeted killing. Her publications include Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (University of California Press, 2005) and Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights (Routledge 2013). She is currently working on two books, The War in Court: The Inside Story of the Fight against US Torture in the “War on Terror,” which is under contract with University of California Press, and Genealogies of Human Rights in the Arab World, coauthored with Omar Dewachi.
Waleed Hazbun - University of Alabama
Waleed Hazbun is a professor in the political science department at the University of Alabama. His work focuses on international relations, US-Middle East relations, critical security studies and the political economy of tourism. He is the author of Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World (University of Minnesota, 2008). He previously taught at the American University of Beirut.
Najib Hourani - Michigan State University
Najib Hourani is an associate professor of anthropology and holds a joint appointment with the Graduate Global Urban Studies Program. He received his BA in political science and an MA in Middle East and North African studies from the University of Michigan. Hourani has published extensively on the post-conflict reconstruction of Beirut following the Lebanese Civil War and the 2006 Summer War. In addition he has explored “market driven” urban development and redevelopment in Amman, Jordan.
Mohammad Ali Kadivar - Boston College
Mohammad Ali Kadivar is an assistant professor of sociology and international studies at Boston College. Kadivar’s research examines both the internal organization, tactics, and perceptions of pro-democracy movements as well as their success or failure in gaining and sustaining democratic improvements.
Reinoud Leenders - King's College London
Reinoud Leenders is a reader in international relations and Middle East studies in the War Studies Department at King’s College London. His research interests and teaching focus on Middle East politics generally and Syria, Lebanon and Iraq in particular. His work deals with the political economy of corruption, authoritarian governance, refugee issues, and conflict. He is the author of many journal articles and the book Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanon (Cornell University Press, 2012).
Shana Marshall - George Washington University and Chair of the Editorial Committee
Shana Marshall is associate director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. She earned her PhD in international relations and comparative politics of the Middle East at the University of Maryland in 2012. Her research focuses on the political economy of the military in Egypt, Jordan and the UAE, and has written for Middle East Report (MERIP), The International Journal of Middle East Studies, Jadaliyya and the Carnegie Middle East Center.
Pete Moore - Case Western Reserve University
Pete W. Moore is the Marcus A. Hanna Associate Professor in Politics at Case Western Reserve University. He has held previous faculty positions at Concordia University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Miami in Coral Gables. His research explores issues of political economy, state-society relations, and sub-state conflict in the Gulf and the Levant.
Curtis Ryan - Appalachian State University
Curtis Ryan is a professor of political science at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. Ryan served as a Fulbright Scholar (1992-93) at the Center for Strategic Studies, University of Jordan, in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and was twice named a Peace Scholar by the United States Institute of Peace. He is the author of three books: Jordan in Transition: From Hussein to Abdullah (Lynne Rienner, 2002), Inter-Arab Alliances: Regime Security and Jordanian Foreign Policy (University Press of Florida, 2009) and Jordan and the Arab Uprisings – Regime Survival and Politics Beyond the State (Columbia University Press, 2018).
Jacob Mundy - Colgate University
Jacob Mundy is an associate professor at Colgate University and was a Fulbright Scholar with the Université de Tunis (2018–2019). He is the author of Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence (Stanford University Press, 2015) and Libya (Polity Press, 2018).
Atef Said - University of Illinois at Chicago
Atef Said is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests include social theory, political sociology, social movements, revolutions and sociology of the Middle East as well as sociology of colonialism and empire. Before starting his academic career, Said worked as a human rights attorney and researcher in Egypt from 1995 to 2004, where he practiced human rights law and directed research initiatives in different human rights organizations. He wrote two books Torture in Egypt: A Judicial Reality (2000), published by the Human Rights Center for the Assistance of Prisoners, and Torture Is a Crime Against Humanity (2008), published by the Hisham Mubarak Law Center. Both organizations are based in Cairo, Egypt. He is currently working on a book manuscript about the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and its aftermath.
Hesham Sallam - Stanford University
Hesham Sallam is a research scholar at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and serves as the associate director of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. He is also a co-editor of Jadaliyya ezine. His research focuses on Islamist movements and the politics of economic reform in the Arab World. He is editor of Egypt’s Parliamentary Elections 2011-2012: A Critical Guide to a Changing Political Arena (Tadween Publishing, 2013).
Deen Sharp - London School of Economics
Deen Sharp is an LSE Fellow in Human Geography in the department of geography and environment at the London School of Economics. He was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the co-director of Terreform, Center for Advanced Urban Research. He is the co-editor of Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings (Urban Research, 2016) and Open Gaza (American University in Cairo Press and Terreform, 2021).
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins - Bard College
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an assistant professor of anthropology at Bard College whose research centers around infrastructure, discard studies, science and environment, climate change, colonialism and postcoloniality, austerity, the “sharing economy,” property, housing, the Middle East and Europe.
Nabil al-Tikriti - University of Mary Washington, Vice-Chair of the Editorial Committee and MERO/Current Analysis Editor
Nabil Al-Tikriti is currently associate professor of Middle East history at the University of Mary Washington and was a member of the MSF/Doctors Without Borders USA Board of Directors from 2011 to 2017, culminating as vice president in 2016-17. He has also served as a consultant, election monitor and relief worker at a number of field locations in Europe, Asia and Africa.
Stacey Philbrick Yadav - Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Stacey Philbrick Yadav is associate professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She specializes in comparative politics of the Middle East and teaches classes in Middle East politics, social movements, political violence, and qualitative and interpretive methods. Her research focuses primarily on the relationship between state and non-state actors and the role of civil actors in armed conflict, particularly in Yemen.
