David Mednicoff

Dr. David Mednicoff is a Fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and served as Chair of the Department of Judaic and Near Studies there from 2018-2025. His research deals broadly with interdisciplinary connections between legal and political ideas and institutions at the national and transnational levels, particularly as these relate to current policy issues in the Middle East. One of these projects, on the meanings and political implications of the rule of law in the Gulf Arab states, was funded by a $1 million grant from the Qatar National Research Fund. He is currently completing a book manuscript on local understandings of the rule of law and their relation to the domestic and regional politics of the Middle East. He has published articles and book chapters on Arab constitutional politics and Islam before and after the events of 2011, the legal regulation of migrant workers in the Arab Gulf, human rights in the Middle East, the politics of Arab monarchical stabilization, humanitarian intervention, refugee policy, and recent authoritarian challenges to international law. He presented his work at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the US Department of State, the Saudi Arabia Institute of Diplomatic Studies, the American University of Beirut, the National University of Singapore, and Georgetown, Stanford and Yale Universities, among other places. Mednicoff's teaching honors include a university-wide Lilly Teaching Fellowship, the U. Mass. College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Outstanding Teacher Award, and a national prize for innovative teaching related to the US after 9/11/01. Prof. Mednicoff was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in law in Qatar in 2006-7, where he taught legal and political philosophy at Qatar University. He was a Research Fellow in 2010-11 in the Middle East Initiative at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He held a Fellowship at the ZIF (Institute for Advanced Study) in Bielefeld, Germany in 2014 and 2015 as a member of a research group on Religion and Human Rights in Constitution-Writing. He writes and comments frequently for the media. He holds a BA from Princeton, and a JD and Ph.D. from Harvard.