Designation: Associate Fellow


Aziz Alghashian

Aziz Alghashian

Aziz Alghashian is a researcher from Saudi Arabia who focuses on the kingdom’s foreign policy strategies. He is known, in particular, as a specialist for Saudi-Israeli as well as for Arab-Israeli relations. Aziz joined the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where he underwent Officer Training, before obtaining his undergraduate degree in International Relations and Global Security […]

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Ilyas Saliba

Ilyas Saliba

Ilyas Saliba is a political scientist focusing on authoritarianism, civil society and human rights in the Arab world and on European foreign and development policy towards the region. Ilyas is currently completing his PhD on authoritarian learning during the so-called Arab Spring at Humboldt University Berlin. During his research, he has conducted extensive fieldwork in […]

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Bernt Berger

Bernt Berger

As an analyst for Asian foreign and security policy, regional conflicts, disarmament on the Korean peninsula as well as Chinese development, foreign and domestic policy, Bernt makes his expertise and consulting services available to various German and international government agencies, parliaments, research and political foundations. He is well connected in East and Southeast Asia and […]

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Dr. Ewa K. Strzelecka

Dr. Ewa K. Strzelecka

Ewa K. Strzelecka is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She holds a PhD degree in Social Science from the University of Granada. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Granada in Spain. She also held positions and fellowships at universities and international organizations in Portugal, Germany, Poland, the UK, the US, Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Western Sahara, Morocco, Mozambique, Bolivia and India. Her main research interests focus on feminisms, human rights, revolutions, transnational politics and the complexity of social and political change in the Middle East and North Africa, with a principal focus on Yemen. She has received numerous honours and awards, including five prestigious prizes for her research on women’s rights movements, gender, culture and development in Yemen. She is the author of Mujeres en la Primavera Árabe: construcción de una cultura política de resistencia feminista en Yemen (Women in the Arab Spring. The Construction of a Political Culture of Feminist Resistance in Yemen, CSIC, 2017).

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Dr. Sarah Wessel

Dr. Sarah Wessel

Sarah Wessel is a political scientist and cultural anthropologist with a focus on the Arab world and relations with Europe. She did her doctorate at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Hamburg on The Making of Political Representation: Processes of Claim-Making and Receiving During the Egyptian Transformations (2011-2014). In her multi-year field research, she examined the political and cultural transformation processes in the Arab region with a focus on Egypt after the uprisings in 2010/2011. The study is an empirical and theoretical contribution to the topic of political representation at the interface of research on democracy and authoritarianism, global governance and critical middle eastern studies. The work was awarded the dissertation prize of the German Middle East Studies Association for Contemporary Research and Documentation (DAVO) 2019.

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Dr. Andrea Warnecke

Dr. Andrea Warnecke

Andrea Warnecke has recently completed her PhD at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence, Department of Political and Social Sciences. Her thesis focuses on the evolution of the post-war peacebuilding practices of a range of international development, humanitarian, and peacekeeping organisations over the past two decades. In particular, the thesis accounts for the persistent depoliticization of external peacebuilding practices by analysing the role of international organisations in post-conflict governance as characterised by tensions between impartiality and political agency.
Prior to undertaking her PhD research, Andrea earned a Master’s degree in History, English Literature, and Media Studies from the University of Bochum, Germany. From 2006 to 2011, she worked as a (Senior) Researcher at Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC). During this time, she acquired and conducted a number of projects, which inter alia received funding under the 7th EU Research Framework Programme, from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, in the fields of involuntary migration, diaspora politics, and peacebuilding and development.

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Sarah Dusend

Sarah Dusend

Sarah Dusend holds a master in Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Political Science and French Language and Literature from the University of Bonn. She studied Arabic and Persian at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris as well as Arabic in Damascus. After completing her M.A. she was the coordinator of the Bonn Center for Asian Studies (2009-2013) as well as the Bonn Graduate School for Oriental and Asian Studies (2013-2015). Currently, she is a research fellow at the Department of Islamic Studies and Near East Languages at the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies (IOA) at the University in Bonn, working on her PhD project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Her thesis deals with three pilgrimage reports by Qajar women at the end of the 19th century.
In addition to her research in the fields of women’s studies and travel writing in the Iranian and Arab world as well as mobility and pilgrimage in Islam, she is furthermore interested in Afghan and Pakistani contemporary historiography and identity politics.

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Tamer Badawi

Tamer Badawi

Tamer Badawi is an analyst and consultant currently focused on violent conflict, security, and governance in Iraq and the wider region. He has worked in journalism, think-tanks, and with INGOs and he has experience publishing in Arabic and English for ten years. His analyses appeared with Sada Journal, Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Centre, The Atlantic Council, Janes, Al Monitor, ISPI, Aljazeera Centre for Studies, among other. His media comments appeared with Aljazeera English, Associated Press, The National, and Deutsche Welle, among other outlets.

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Dr. Tobias Zumbrägel

Dr. Tobias Zumbrägel

Dr. Tobias Zumbrägel is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the department for Human Geography at Heidelberg University. Prior to this, he worked at CARPO as well as at the center for excellence Climate, Climatic Change and Society (CLICCS) at the University of Hamburg, where he is also an associate fellow. He studied History, Political […]

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Dr. Julia Gurol-Haller

Dr. Julia Gurol-Haller

Julia Gurol-Haller is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Chair for International Relations at Freiburg University and the Arnold-Bergstraesser Institute Freiburg. Her dissertation dealt with European-Chinese security relations in the Middle East and was published as a monograph with Bristol University Press in January 2022. Julia’s areas of expertise are China as a global actor, global authoritarianism, infrastructure & connectivity as well as Chinese foreign and security policy and China-Gulf relations.Read more

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