Fawaz Gerges

Fawaz Gerges has spent his life challenging the world’s easy answers about the Middle East. A professor at the London School of Economics and one of the most respected field scholars of his generation, Gerges has pushed back against the tendency to reduce a region of extraordinary complexity into digestible tropes about religion, violence, or “ancient hatreds.”

He sees modern Middle East as the consequence of a century-long entanglement between foreign empire, domestic authoritarianism, and the agency of ordinary people. “Neat explanations,” he often warns, “ignore the pulses beneath the surface.” Gerges’ research has taken him from Cairo and Beirut to London and New York, from conversations with jihadis to interviews with civil society leaders fighting for basic freedoms.

Fawaz Gerges is best known for calling things before others will. He diagnosed the ideological unraveling of Al-Qaeda when the group was still ascendant. He challenged the West’s fantasy of regime stability while most analysts clung to autocratic “moderates.” And long before the Arab Spring, he warned that the real political energy in the region was not in palace intrigue, but in the frustrated hopes of a rising generation.

His latest book, The Great Betrayal, is a wide-angled study of how three forces (foreign intervention, authoritarian rule, and prolonged conflict) have strangled the region’s political evolution. But the book also offers a rare and unapologetic defense of popular agency. “The future of the Middle East will not be decided by emirs, generals, or foreign powers,” Gerges writes. “It will be shaped by a growing population of young people who demand to be treated as citizens.”

Fawaz Gerges earned his doctorate from Oxford and has taught at Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton. He has been awarded fellowships from MacArthur, Fulbright, and Carnegie, and his voice carries weight in both scholarly and public debates, with commentary featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and on the BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN, and NPR.