Articles
Global Conference On Yemen Participant Biographies
Tawakkol Karman was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 in recognition of her work in nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peacebuilding work in Yemen. Amongst Yemen’s opposition movement, she is known as “mother of the revolution” and “the iron woman.” Upon being awarded the prize, Tawakkol became the first Yemeni, the first Arab woman, and the second Muslim woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize, as well as the youngest Nobel Peace Laureate at the time, at the age of 32.
Leymah Gbowee received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her work in leading a women’s peace movement that brought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. Gbowee shared the prize with fellow Liberian Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Yemen-native Tawakkol Karman. Leymah is the founder and president of Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa based in Liberia. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Nobel Women’s Initiative, Gbowee Peace Foundation and the PeaceJam Foundation, and she is a member of the African Women Leaders Network for Reproductive Health and Family Planning.
Shirin Ebadi was awarded the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to promote human rights, and especially the rights of women, children, and political prisoners in Iran. Dr. Ebadi was one of the first female judges in Iran. She served as president of the city court of Tehran from 1975 to 1979 and was the first Iranian woman to achieve Chief Justice status. She has established many Iranian NGOs, including the Million Signatures Campaign, and published over 70 articles and 13 books on human rights, some of which have been published by UNICEF. In 2004, she was named by Forbes Magazine as one of the 100 most powerful women in the world.
Jody Williams received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her work with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Williams took a leading role in establishing the Nobel Women's Initiative (NWI), bringing together six of the seven living women Nobel Peace Prize laureates to lend their support to women working for peace, justice and equality around the world. She led a High Level Mission on Darfur for the UN's Human Rights Council in 2007. In 2004, she was named by Forbes as one of the 100 most powerful women in the world.
Kathryn Achilles is Oxfam's Senior Humanitarian Policy Advisor since 2017, leading advocacy with the UNSC on crisis contexts, including Yemen. Prior to this, she spent 18 months as an emergencies campaigns manager with the organisation and was deployed in Southern Africa and the Lake Chad Basin. Before joining Oxfam, she was Saferworld's Advocacy Advisor for Somalia and the Horn of Africa, working on civil society engagement in peace and development processes. She also spent five years working with Amnesty International on a variety of issues protecting civilians and refugees in Somalia and East Africa.
Fatima Alasrar is a Senior Analyst for the Arabia Foundation. Prior to joining the Arabia Foundation, Ms. Fatima was the MENA director for Cure Violence, a research associate at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, a Mason fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, and an international policy fellow at the Open Society Foundations. From 2006-2012 she worked as an advisor for the Embassy of Yemen in Washington, DC. Earlier in her career, Ms. Fatima served as a program officer for the Department for International Development (DFID) in Yemen.
Stephen W. Day is an adjunct professor of international affairs at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL, specializing in Middle East politics with a focus on Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula. Over the past two decades, Dr. Day taught at St. Lawrence University of New York, Indiana University, and Stetson University of Florida. He was designated a specialist in diplomacy and peacemaking by the Fulbright scholarship program between 2012 and 2014. He is author of the 2012 book, Regionalism and Rebellion in Yemen: A Troubled National Union, and Global Regional, and Local Dynamics in Yemen's War (forthcoming, 2020).
Dr. Dalia Fahmy is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Long Island University and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Policy in Washington DC. Dr. Fahmy is a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University. Her books include The Rise and Fall of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Future of Political Islam (forthcoming), and two co-edited volumes Illiberal Intelligentsia and the Future of Egyptian Democracy, and International Relations in a Changing World.
Ghida Fakhry is a Presenter for TRT World. She hosts the network's flagship political program from Washington DC, Bigger than Five. She is also the Moderator of Doha Debates. She was previously a Lead Anchor for Al Jazeera English, presenting the network's News hour and the award-winning program Witness. She has reported extensively from the UN, conducted interviews with Heads of State and Government and international officials, and moderates high level panels for the UN , the World Bank, and leading NGOs. She is a Contributor to the Huffington Post, writing on US foreign policy and global affairs.
Mehdi Hasan is an award-winning British journalist, broadcaster, author and political commentator. He is the presenter of both UpFront (filmed in Washington DC) and Head to Head (filmed at the Oxford Union). Mehdi is a senior contributor at the The Intercept (TI), and host of TI's Deconstructed podcast. He has been named one of the 100 'most influential' Britons on Twitter, and was included in the annual global list of 'The 500 Most Influential Muslims' in the world ('The Muslim 500').
Bernard Haykel is professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University where he directs the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East and the Program in Near Eastern Studies. He is a scholar of the Arabian Peninsula, with focuses on Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC), and Yemen. Professor Haykel is the author of Revival and Reform in Islam, and most recently the co-editor of Saudi Arabia in Transition. He has received several prominent awards including Oxford’s Prize Fellowship, the Carnegie Corporation and Guggenheim fellowships and the Princeton’s Old Dominion Professorship.
Nabeel Khoury is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Hariri Center for the Middle East. After twenty five years in the Foreign Service, Dr. Khoury retired from the U.S. Department of State in 2013 with the rank of Minister Counselor. Khoury served as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. embassy in Yemen (2004-2007). His commentaries appear on the Atlantic Council’s MENA Resource, The Hill, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs and on his own blog, Middle East Corner.
Moncef Marzouki was the first democratically elected president of Tunisia after the January 14th Revolution. He is a doctor of medicine, a human rights activist, an author of numerous works on political philosophy in the Arab world, and founder of the center-left Congress Party for the Republic (CPR). In 2015, Dr. Marzouki founded the Movement for Popular Citizenship. He has published more than twenty books in Arabic and French between 1980 and 2011, encompassing a variety of topics related to the ideas and ideals of democracy and human rights in Arab-Islamic society.
Priyanka Motaparthy is a senior researcher in the Emergencies division of Human Rights Watch. Prior to joining the Emergencies team, she was the children’s rights researcher for the Middle East and North Africa. She has investigated human rights abuses in Egypt, Syria, and Yemen, and has authored several reports on the abuse of migrant workers in the Gulf, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Her writing has appeared in outlets including The Nation magazine, the New Yorker online, CNN, and Foreign Policy. She speaks Arabic and Telugu.
Bushra Nasr Kretschmer is the founder of Sabaa Consulting Services. She is an expert in finance and economic development with 15 years of experience. She has worked with the international finance corporations including IFC, USAID, GIZ, the Malaysian Government, Icon Institute GmbH, Indevelop, Forumsyd in different regions; MENA, Sub-Sahara Africa, Malaysia and Sweden. Nasr is also a Fellow of the Women in Conflict 1325 at Beyond Borders Scotland.
Afrah Nasser is a Yemeni journalist and founding editor-in-chief of "Sana'a Review" website. She was the 2017 recipient of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award. She contributed to the Yemen Times Newspaper from 2004-2012 and was a social and cultural editor at the Yemen Observer from 2008-2011. She has published and appeared on a number of platforms including Al Jazeera English, CNN, The New Arab, BBC, and Middle East Eye among others.
Ibraham Qatabi is an expert on Yemen and a senior legal worker at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He also serves as a UN/U.S. advisor to the Nobel Peace Laureate Tawakkol Karman of Yemen, and was a lead advisor on the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. He is a frequent commentator on Yemeni affairs on various cable news networks, including Al Aljazeera, RT, Aljazeera America, and Alhurra TV, among others. During the Arab Spring, Qatabi co-founded the Yemeni American Coalition for Change (YACC) to support change and the democracy movement in Yemen.
Rawya Rageh is an Amnesty International Senior Crisis Advisor. Her work here has included documenting violations in the Philippines, Syria, and Yemen. Prior to that, Rageh was a journalist for 15 years, covering the Middle East and Africa for the Associated Press and Al Jazeera English. Among the stories she covered were the aftermath of 9/11 in the Middle East, the Iraq War, the conflict in Darfur, the Arab Uprisings and their aftermath, as well as the impact of the violence by the African armed groups, Boko Haram and Al Shabaab. Rageh traveled to Yemen on mission for Amnesty International in 2018 and documented the impact of fighting in Hodeidah governorate and detention-related violations in the south.
Hassan El-Tayyab is a Co-director of Just Foreign Policy. He is immensely involved in various grassroots lobbying efforts for peace in Yemen, which contributed to the Senate passage SJRes54 war powers resolution to end U.S. involvement in the Saudi war on Yemen. He has worked with numerous advocacy organizations including Freedom Works, Defense Priorities, In Defense of Christians, the Koch Institute, FCNL, Win Without War, Committee for Responsible Foreign Policy, Demand Progress, Yemen Peace Project, Peace Action, and many others. Hassan has also taken dozens of meetings with Congressional offices alongside national security expert Col Larry Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell’s chief of Staff during the Bush Administration.
Paul Williams is the former Legal Adviser to the UN Special Envoy to Yemen and currently holds the Rebecca I. Grazier Professorship in Law and International Relations at American University. Dr. Williams is also the co-founder of the Public International Law & Policy Group (PILPG), a pro bono law firm providing legal assistance to states and governments involved in peace negotiations, post-conflict constitution drafting, and the prosecution of war criminals. He is a world renowned peace negotiation lawyer, to which he has assisted over two dozen parties in major international peace negotiations including his efforts in Yemen.
Dr. Nasser Zawia is the Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Rhode Island, where he oversees about 90 masters, doctoral, and professional degree programs with an enrollment of about 3000 students. He is the founder and director of the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program and played a founding role in the formation of the George and Anne Ryan Institute for Neuroscience. He has received numerous honors such as US Environmental Protection Agency (Scientific and Technological Achievement Award, Level I), Fidia Foundation, NIH, the Government of Yemen, the Indian Society of Physiology, and others.