Ahmad Samih Khalidi
Ahmad Samih Khalidi is Associate Fellow at the Center for Security Policy, Geneva, and Senior Fellow at the Institute of Palestine Studies, Beirut. A Palestinian from Jerusalem educated at Oxford and London Universities, Khalidi has been a Senior Associate Member at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and co-editor of the Arabic edition of the Journal of Palestine Studies. He served as advisor to the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid/Washington peace talks between 1991 and 1993, as senior advisor on security in the 1993 Cairo-Taba PLO-Israeli talks, and as advisor to Presidents Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. Khalidi has written widely in both English and Arabic in outlets such as Foreign Affairs, the New Yorker, Foreign Policy, the New York Times, The Guardian, the Cairo Review, Prospect, and OpenDemocracy, among others. He is author of three books: Syria and Iran: Rivalry and Cooperation, (Chatham House, 1995), Track-2 Diplomacy; Lessons from the Middle East (MIT Press, 2003), and A Palestinian National Security Framework (Chatham House, 2006).
Aimee Shalan
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Aimee Shalan is Chief Executive of Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). She was formerly Director of Fobzu (Friends of Birzeit University), a UK-based charity supporting the right to education for Palestinians, and Co-founder and Director of Pressure Cooker Arts, a not-for-profit arts and advocacy organisation. Before that she was Director of Advocacy at MAP and Head of Education at the Council for Arab British Understanding. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian and has written for a variety of media outlets. She taught at City University and Queen Mary, University of London, and has a doctorate in the Politics of Palestinian Literature.
Abaher El-Sakka
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Abaher El-Sakka is a sociologist with a PhD degree in Sociology, University of Nantes with distinction, 2005. He was a Researcher and lecturer at the University of Nantes from 1998 to 2006 and is currently a professor at Birzeit University at the department of social and behavioural sciences. He is also visiting professor at several universities in France and Belgium. His current research interest focuses on the social history and the historiography of the social sciences. He is currently writing on social history of Gaza under British colonisation.
Abdullah Al-Arian
Abdullah Al-Arian is an assistant 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 (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is also co-editor of the Critical Currents in Islam page on the Jadaliyya e-zine. Twitter: @anhistorian
Abir Kopty
Al-Shabaka policy member Abir Kopty, holds an MA in Political Communication from the City University, London, and is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include power dynamics in online communities and the use of social media networks for social and political activism.
Ahmad Amara
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Ahmad Amara is a human rights advocate and a graduate of the joint PhD program in History and Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University. Before pursuing his PhD degree, Amara served for three years as a clinical instructor and global advocacy fellow with Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program. Amara holds an LLB and LLM from Tel-Aviv University, and a second master’s degree in international human rights law from Essex University in the United Kingdom. Amara has a number of publications, including the co-edited volume “Indigenous (In)Justice: Human Rights Law and Bedouin Arabs in the Naqab/Negev” by Harvard University Press.
Ghada Majadli
Ghada Majadli is a researcher and activist who has previously served as the director of the Department of The Occupied Palestinian Territory at Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI). She holds a master’s in Human Rights and Transitional Justice from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her work primarily focuses on Palestinian health and human rights; she pays particular attention to the multilayered system of control and management of Palestinians’ health by the Israeli regime. Ghada has published several papers in peer-reviewed journals, including the Health and Human Rights Journal, Developing World Bioethics, and The Lancet. Her commentaries have been featured in various international and local media outlets, including Le Monde, Al-Jazeera English, The New Arab, Jewish Currents, Middle East Eye, and others.
Lana Tatour
Lana Tatour is a Lecturer in Development at the School of Social Sciences, UNSW Sydney. She works on settler colonialism, indigeneity, race, citizenship, human rights, and the Middle East with a focus on Palestine and Israel. Prior to joining the School of Social Sciences, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, and held visiting fellowships at the Palestinian-American Research Center, the Australian Human Rights Centre, UNSW Faculty of Law and UNSW School of Social Sciences. She is on the board of The Australian Journal of Human Rights. She is currently working on her manuscript Ambivalent Resistance: Palestinians in Israel and the Liberal Politics of Settler Colonialism and Human Rights, and on an edited volume together with Dr Ronit Lentin on Race and the Question of Palestine.
Nadi Abusaada
Nadi Abusaada is an architect, urbanist and a historian. He is currently an Aga Khan Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States. Nadi’s PhD at the University of Cambridge examined the history of urban planning and urban governance in late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine. Nadi is also the co-founder of Arab Urbanism, a global network dedicated to historical and contemporary urban issues in the Arab region. His writings have been featured in a number of international publications including The Architectural Review, The International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and the Jerusalem Quarterly among others.
