Research Fellow, Technology & Geopolitics/ Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program
Email: nurlaiq@hks.harvard.edu
79 John F. Kennedy Street
Mailbox 134
Cambridge, MA 02138
Dr. Nur Laiq is a Technology & Geopolitics Fellow and an Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Laiq researches how governments manage – or fail to manage – technological change in a globalized world. Her case study is the United States at the start of our contemporary age of tech, in the late 20th century. Her work engages with the history of political and policy decisions around tech in the United States during this period, in the context of innovation, regulation, industrial policy, and foreign policy.
Laiq’s scholarship offers a deeper understanding of the role of politics and policymaking in reconfiguring economic and geopolitical landscapes of tech, from the subnational to the national, and supranational level. Laiq’s work aims to better inform decision making around the future of technology policy in the United States and at the international level at the United Nations.
Laiq’s interest in tech grew out of her experience as a policy advisor, which included engaging with governments, think thanks, and the United Nations. Laiq worked on a range of political, socio-economic, and security challenges, in the context of which tech increasingly stood out as the emerging issue of our era.
Laiq has held visiting fellowships at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and the Center for Policy Research. She has been an Andrew Mellon visiting fellow at Oxford University. She has served on a task force of the Center for American Progress and on an advisory group appointed by the UN Secretary General. Laiq has held senior policy analyst positions at the International Peace Institute and the UN Department for Political Affairs. Her first job was as a stagiaire at the European Commission. Her first publications were on another cross-cutting issue, that of the Middle East, on which she authored Talking to Arab Youth: Revolution and Counterrevolution in Egypt and Tunisia (New York: International Peace Institute, 2013) and co-edited The Search for Peace in the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
She has been invited to give talks at the World Bank, UN, European Commission, House of Commons, Chatham House, Yale, Columbia, NYU, LSE, Melbourne University, National University of Singapore, and Nehru Memorial Library, among other places.
Laiq holds a D.Phil. (doctorate) in History from Oxford University.