About the Authors
Tim Eaton is a research fellow in the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, where he has been based since 2014. His research focuses on the political economy of the Libyan conflict. In 2018, he authored a report on the development of Libya’s war economy that illustrates how economic activities have become increasingly connected to violence. Previously, he managed Chatham House’s research on the Syrian conflict. Before joining Chatham House, he worked for BBC Media Action, the BBC’s international development charity, on projects in Libya, Iraq and Egypt. He is a regular contributor to the media, having written for the Washington Post, the BBC, Newsweek, CNN, War on the Rocks and the New Statesman, among others. He was awarded the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies Departmental Scholarship to undertake his MA in Middle East politics at Exeter University, and holds a BA in history from Nottingham University and a diploma in Arabic from SOAS University of London.
Dr Christine Cheng is a lecturer in war studies at King’s College London. Her research on post-conflict transitions sits at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics (with a focus on the politics of West Africa). She is co-editor of Corruption and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: Selling the Peace? (Routledge) and the author of Extralegal Groups in Post-Conflict Liberia – How Trade Makes the State (OUP), which won the 2019 Conflict Research Society’s Book of the Year Award. Most recently, Christine has worked as an academic advisor to the UK Stabilisation Unit on the Elite Bargains project, which The Guardian has called ‘the British government’s most comprehensive analysis of what makes external diplomatic and military interventions succeed or fail’. At King’s, she teaches on the MA in conflict, security and development. Christine holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford and an MPA from Princeton University. Previously, she was the Bennett Boskey Fellow in Politics at Exeter College, University of Oxford. In 2009, she was the Cadieux-Léger Fellow at Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. She sits on the Advisory Board of Women in Foreign Policy. She tweets @cheng_christine.
Dr Renad Mansour is a research fellow in the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House. His research explores the situation of Iraq in transition and the dilemmas posed by state-building. He is also a research fellow at the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani (AUIS). Renad was previously a lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he taught on the international relations of the Middle East. He has also held teaching positions at the faculty of politics at the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Chatham House, Renad has held research positions at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, the Iraq Institute for Strategic Studies in Beirut, and the Cambridge Security Initiative in Cambridge. He received his PhD from Cambridge University.
Peter Salisbury is a senior consulting fellow in the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, and a consulting senior analyst for Yemen at International Crisis Group. Peter is the former energy editor of the Middle East Economic Digest (MEED), and has worked as a journalist and analyst focused on political economy issues in the MENA region since 2008. He has written widely for The Economist, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy and Vice News among other publications, and worked as a consultant to the UK government’s Department for International Development, the UN and the World Bank. Between 2011 and 2013, Peter worked closely with the Yemen Forum at Chatham House on a series of public and private research projects on the political economy of Yemen. Peter holds an MSc in international politics from SOAS University of London and an MA in English and Scottish literature from the University of Edinburgh.
Jihad Yazigi is a Syrian journalist and analyst who specializes in Syrian economic affairs. He is the founder and editor of The Syria Report, an online economics news bulletin, and co-founder of The Syrian Observer, which translates articles from Syrian publications into English. Jihad is also a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, where he has published reports on Syria’s war economy and decentralization. He recently published a report for Friedrich Ebert Stiftung on the regime’s capitalization on property destruction and reconstruction.
Dr Lina Khatib is the head of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House. She was formerly director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, and the co-founding head of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Her research focuses on the international relations of the Middle East, Islamist groups and security, political transitions and foreign policy, with special attention to the Syrian conflict. She is a research associate at SOAS University of London, was a senior research associate at the Arab Reform Initiative, and lectured at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published seven books and has also written widely on public diplomacy, political communication and political participation in the Middle East. She is a frequent commentator on politics and security in the Middle East and North Africa at events around the world and in the media.