Marsin Alshamary is a post-doctoral research fellow with the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. Her research focuses on Iraqi politics, Iraqi-U.S. relations, Shiite political activism, as well as civil society and social movements in the broader Middle East. While at Brookings, she is working on her book, which examines the role of Shi'a clerics in Iraqi protest movements across the last century. Alshamary is also a nonresident fellow at the Institute of Regional & International Studies at the American University of Iraq - Sulaimani.
Prior to Brookings, Alshamary was a pre-doctoral fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School. She has a doctorate in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a thesis titled: “Prophets and Priests: Religious Leaders and Protest in Iraq”. While at MIT, Alshamary was also a member of the Security Studies Program, where she worked on several projects relating to civil society and religious authority in Iraq.
Alshamary’s research is based on continuous fieldwork in Iraq and Lebanon. In her other ongoing research projects, Alshamary maps out civil society organizations in Iraq and examines their role in social movements, including the most recent protests in October 2019. She is also studying the roots of low-level corruption in post-conflict communities, looking at how perceptions of elite corruption influence decisions of small-business owners. This research has taken her to Baghdad, Babylon, Diwaniya, Kerbala, Najaf and the Kurdistan Region.
In addition to her academic work, Alshamary has written numerous op-eds for various U.S. and Iraq-based outlets, including 1001 Iraqi Thoughts, MIT CIS’s Precis Magazine, PRI’s The World, War on the Rocks, and The Washington Post. She has presented her work at universities, research institutions, and international organizations in the United States and the Middle East. In Iraq, Alshamary has taught several policy research training workshops.
Alshamary holds a bachelor's in international relations from Wellesley College, where she was an Albright Fellow.
