Brookings Doha Center Welcomes New Director of Research

Doha, 24 June, 2014: Sultan Barakat, founding director of the Post-War Reconstruction and Development Unit (PRDU) at the University of York, has joined the Brookings Doha Center as the new Director of Research, BDC director Salman Shaikh announced this week.

Barakat’s work at the Brookings Doha Center will focus on issues of conflict management, humanitarian response, and post-conflict recovery and transition in West Asia and North Africa.

“The region faces enormous security and development challenges and I look forward to working closely with colleagues in Doha and Brookings offices in Washington, New Delhi and Beijing to better understand the nature of those challenges and to help devise appropriate and timely policy responses” Barakat said.

In addition to his research and teaching at PRDU, Barakat serves as senior advisor and consultant to numerous United Nations organizations, national governments, and non-governmental organizations. In these capacities he evaluates the recovery of war-torn and fragile states around the world and advocates for best practices based on community-driven recovery models.

“We are very fortunate to have Sultan Barakat join us at the Brookings Doha Center,” Brookings Doha Center Director Salman Shaikh said. “His expertise will be an invaluable addition as we continue to expand our research platform; his extensive work on recovery models makes him uniquely poised to address critical questions facing the region. The Center also looks forward to providing a platform from which Barakat can conduct his valuable research on Qatar’s mediation capacity.”

Barakat’s research focus includes strategic conflict assessment; post-conflict reconstruction and state-building; humanitarian response; education in conflict and emergencies; as well as program evaluation and value attribution. Underlying these themes is a principal research concern with public diplomacy towards the Muslim World and the effectiveness of the research-policy nexus.  He has published widely and acted as a principle investigator on numerous large-scale research projects, funded by the United Kingdom, the Economic and Social Research Council, European Union, World Bank and others.  Much of his work has been based in conflict affected states worldwide, most notably in the Middle East and North Africa region, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.