Bio
Sanam Vakil is James Anderson Adjunct Professor at SAIS Europe
Director, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House
Sanam Vakil is the James Anderson Adjunct Professor at The Johns Hopkins University SAIS Europe, and Director of Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme. Previously she was the deputy director and a senior research fellow in the programme. Sanam leads the Iran Forum project focusing on future trends in Iran's domestic and foreign policy and follows GCC and Gulf Arab dynamics alongside wider regional security issues in the Middle East. Sanam has been a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University associated with the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.
Before these appointments, from 2003-2005, Sanam was an assistant professor of Middle East Studies at SAIS Washington. She served as a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations also providing research analysis to the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa department. Sanam provides research, commentary and political risk analysis for companies and organizations working in the Middle East. She has been consulted by high ranking government officials in the United States and Europe. Vakil holds a PhD in international relations from SAIS. Professor Vakil is the author of numerous monographs, book reviews, working papers and articles in U.S. and international journals on Middle East and U.S. foreign policy.
Courses
- Political Leadership in the Middle East
Change in the Middle East has often been attributed to charismatic and powerful leaders, whose influence has been magnified by crisis, wars, and authoritarian traditions. This course combines biography with politics to ask whether, how, and in which circumstances, individual leaders have
changed the course of modern Middle Eastern history. Special attention is paid to the interaction of leaders and mass movements, and leadership dynamics in the unfolding “Arab Spring.”
- Twin Pillars of the Gulf: Regional Rivalries, and Geopolitical Dynamics
This course examines Persian Gulf politics through the prism of Iran and Saudi Arabia- their history, domestic evolutions, foreign policy, ideology and position in the Persian Gulf. Once known in the American foreign policy establishment as the Twin Pillars of the Gulf, they both supported American political and economic interests until 1979. Iran and Saudi Arabia have followed similar economic and political trajectories. The outcome of such paths however, has been decidedly different. In addition to weighing in on the competing ideological visions and dominating regional position of these two Persian Gulf heavyweights, this course will assess the impact of these states on those of the region including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar.
