Working Group
Since January 2024, an interdisciplinary working group of experts and practitioners has been supporting the regional activities in order to bring together the experience and knowledge gained from the various topics and sectors.
Ahmed Alwadaey
Ahmed Alwadaey is Director of the Ettifag Center for Consultancies and Associate Professor of Soil, Water and Environment at the University of Sana'a in Yemen. His main areas of interest and research are agricultural and environmental research, field studies and peacebuilding related to water and environmental issues.
Shivan Fazil
Shivan Fazil is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Regional and International Studies (IRIS) at the American University Iraq in Sulaimani (AUIS). Prior to joining IRIS, he was a research fellow in the Middle East and North Africa Program at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Stockholm. His work focuses on governance, state-society relations, and peace and conflict dynamics in Iraq and spans more than a decade, during which he has worked with SIPRI (2020-2024), the United States Institute of Peace (2019-2020), Oxfam (2017), and the Middle East Research Institute (2015-2016), among others.
Hussam Hussein
Dr. Hussam Hussein is a Fellow of the International Science Council and a research associate in international relations at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the role of discourses in shaping water policies in the Middle East, transboundary water governance and critical hydropolitics, and issues related to the political economy of environmental governance. His dissertation examined the discourse on water scarcity in Jordan and its impact on transboundary water governance. He holds a PhD in International Development from the University of East Anglia.
Sarine Karajerjian
Sarine Karajerjian is the Program Director of the Environmental Politics program at the Arab Reform Initiative (ARI). Prior to working at ARI, she worked for 15 years at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University Beirut (AUB). Her previous work covered strategic management, fundraising and outreach, and partnerships and grants management. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and writing her dissertation on the exile and trauma of Syrian refugee women in Beirut. She holds a Masters’ degree in Environmental Policy Planning and a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Health from AUB.
Sammy Kayed
Asma Khalifa
Tobias Zumbrägel
Dr. Tobias Zumbrägel is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Human Geography at Heidelberg University. Previously, he worked at the Cluster of Excellence Climate, Climatic Change and Society (CLICCS) at the University of Hamburg, where he is an Associate Fellow. He is the author of Political Power and Environmental Sustainability in Gulf Monarchies (Palgrave 2022).