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.”
Dena Qaddumi
Dena Qaddumi is an architect and urbanist currently based in Doha. Her research interests are primarily concerned with how social movements engage with urban space and how this process creates new avenues for citizenship formation.
Caroline Abu-Sada
Caroline Abu-Sada is Director of the Research Unit of Medecins Sans Frontieres Switzerland, and an Honorary Lecturer at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI), University of Manchester. She has worked on food security, agriculture and health issues, and coordinated programs in the Middle East for Oxfam GB, the United Nations and MSF Switzerland. Dr Abu-Sada works include “ONG palestiniennes et construction étatique, l’expérience de Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (PARC) dans les Territoires occupés palestiniens, 1983- 2005”, IFPO, Beirut, 2005; and “Dilemmas, Challenges, and Ethics of Humanitarian Action”, Mc Gill-Queen’s University Press, 2012. She has taught political science at New York University, Paris and at Sciences Po, Lille.
Ata Hindi
Al-Shabaka member Ata Hindi is currently a PhD in Law candidate at Tilburg University and holds an Advanced LLM in Public International Law from Leiden University. He has previously worked with a number of international NGOs focused on international law, especially in Palestine and the Arab World.
Amjad Iraqi
Al-Shabaka Member Amjad Iraqi is an editor and writer at +972 Magazine, based in Haifa. He was previously an advocacy coordinator at Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. In addition to +972, his writings have appeared in the London Review of Books, The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, and The Hill, among others. Amjad has an MA in Public Policy from King’s College London, and an Hon. BA in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Toronto.
Alaa Tartir
Alaa Tartir is Al-Shabaka’s program and policy advisor. He is a senior researcher and director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, as well as a research associate and academic coordinator at the Geneva Graduate Institute, global fellow at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, and governing board member of the Arab Reform Initiative. Alaa holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and is co-editor of Resisting Domination in Palestine: Mechanisms and Techniques of Control, Coloniality and Settler Colonialism (2023), Political Economy of Palestine: Critical, Interdisciplinary, and Decolonial Perspectives (2021) and Palestine and Rule of Power: Local Dissent vs. International Governance (2019). He can be followed on Twitter (@alaatartir), and his publications can be accessed at www.alaatartir.com.
Amal Ahmad
Amal Ahmad is a Palestinian economic researcher. Amal interned at the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute in Ramallah before completing a Master’s degree in development economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Her work focuses on fiscal and monetary relations between Israel and Palestine; she is also interested in the political economy of development in the broader Middle East.
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.
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).
