Sharan Grewal

Sharan Grewal is a nonresident senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. He is also an assistant professor of government at American University and a faculty affiliate at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard. He received a doctorate in politics from Princeton University in 2018.

Grewal’s research examines revolutions and democratic transitions, particularly in Egypt and Tunisia. His first book, “Soldiers of Democracy? Military Legacies and the Arab Spring” (Oxford University Press, 2023), examines why militaries support or thwart democratic transitions. It won the APSA Best Book in MENA Politics Award and co-won the Robert Jervis Best International Security Book Award. He is currently writing a second book on the rise and fall of Tunisian democracy.

Sharan has published academic articles in the American Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science, among other journals. These articles have explored the effects of U.S. military training in Tunisia, the response of Algeria’s military to the Hirak protests, and the conditions under which Islamists moderate or radicalize. These articles have won best paper and article awards from APSA as well as the Perry World House-Foreign Affairs Emerging Scholars Prize.

Sharan has also written for the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, New Lines Magazine, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and has been interviewed by the New York Times, Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, and Reuters, among others.