Jaber Suleiman
Jaber Suleiman is an independent researcher/consultant in Refugee Studies. Since 2011, he has been working as a consultant and coordinator for the Lebanese Palestinian Dialogue Forum at the Common Space Initiative, UNDP Support Project on Consensus Building, and Civil Peace in Lebanon. Between 2007 and 2010, he worked as a consultant for the Palestinian program of UNICEF in Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon. He was a Visiting Study Fellow at the Refugee Studies Program, University of Oxford. He is also a co-founder of Aidoun Group & the Centre for Refugee Rights/Aidoun, and has written several studies dealing with Palestinian refugees and the right of return.
Ibrahim Fraihat
Al-Shabaka Member Ibrahim Fraihat is a professor of international conflict resolution at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, and Affiliate Scholar at Georgetown University. He previously served as Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and taught international conflict resolution at George Washington University and George Mason University. His latest book is Unfinished Revolutions: Yemen, Libya, and Tunisia after the Arab Spring (Yale University Press, 2016). He is the recipient of George Mason University’s Distinguished Alumni Award (2014) for his achievements in the field of conflict resolution. Fraihat can be followed on Twitter @i_farihat.
Hani Faris
Hani Faris is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He previously served at various universities, including Kuwait, Harvard, McGill, and Simon Fraser. He has written many academic articles and his books include Beyond the Lebanese Civil War. He has written more than twenty book chapters and over forty academic articles on such topics as Arab nationalism, the Middle East in world politics, Zionism, Lebanese politics, history of the Palestinian issue, and Third World development. Faris serves on the editorial board of Contemporary Arab Affairs and is president of the Board of Trans Arab Research Institute, (TARI).
Fateh Azzam
Fateh Azzam is the Director of the newly established Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at the American University in Beirut, and Senior Policy Fellow at AUB’s Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy. Previously, he directed al-Haq (1987-1995), was Human Rights Officer at the Ford Foundation (1996-2003), Director of Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo (2003-2006) and Middle East regional Representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights until July 2012. He is co-founder and former Board Chair of the Arab Human Rights Fund.
Dyala Hamzah
Al-Shabaka policy member Dyala Hamzah is an associate professor of Arab History at the University of Montreal. She served as editor of the 2013 Routledge volume The Making of the Arab Intellectual and is author of the forthcoming text, Muhammad Rashid Rida ou le Tournant Salafiste (CNRS Éditions, 2019). Dyala has published with Princeton and Oxford University Presses, as well as in academic journals including CSAAME, REMMM and Égypte-Monde Arabe. She is currently conducting a project on Mandate Palestine and Arab Nationalism. Her upcoming Palestine. Le Sionisme est-il réformable? is under contract with Presses de l’Université de Montréal (PUM, 2020).
Dina Matar
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Dina Matar is senior lecturer in political communication at the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She works on the relationship between culture, communication and politics, with a special focus on Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. She is the author of “What it Means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood” (Tauris, 2010); co-editor of “Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communication Practices in Palestine and Lebanon” (Taruis, 2013) and co-author of “The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication” (Hurst, 2014). Matar is also co-founding editor of the “The Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication.”
Dalal Yassine
Dalal Yassine is a lawyer and advocate for gender and human rights for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Dalal has previously worked with several Palestinian NGOs in Lebanon and formerly served as coordinator for The Right to Work Campaign for Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon. She is the co-author of The Legal Status of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon (2007) and completed a multi-site study titled The Empowerment of Women in Refugee Camps in Lebanon.
Belal Shobaki
Belal Shobaki is the Head of the Department of Political Science at Hebron University, Palestine. He is a Policy Member at the Palestinian Policy Network. He is the founder and coordinator of the Double Master’s degree program in Public and cultural Diplomacy at Hebron University with University of Siena, Italy. He has published on Political Islam, identity, democratization and Palestinian issue. He is also leading Hebron University team of a 3 years project: Strengthening of National Research Capacity on Policy, Conflict Resolution, and Reconciliation, funded by the Erasmus+ program of the European Union. He has previously taught at An-Najah National University, Palestine and at IIUM, Malaysia.
Basem Ezbidi
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Basem Ezbidi currently teaches at the Honors Program and the Department of International Affairs at Qatar University. He previously worked at Birzeit University as part of the department of Political Science and the Master program of Democracy and Human Rights. Ezbidi holds a Ph.D. in political theory from the University of Cincinnati in the United States. He has written on Hamas, state-building, and the West and the Moslem World. Among his publications, The Muslim World and the West – A Muslim Perspective; Coauthor of “Palestinian National Authority and the Future of State Formation”, and ‘Hamas and Palestinian Statehood’; Co-editor of “Popular Protest In The New Middle East: Islamism and Post-Islamist Politics”.
