Mohammad Tabaar

Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar is a non-resident fellow with the Middle East Initiative and an Associate with the Project on Managing at the Atom at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center. He is also an Associate Professor of International Affairs at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service. He is also a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. His research focuses on Middle East politics and international security. He has previously been a visiting scholar with the Kennedy School’s Managing the Atom Project and remains an associate with that project.

He is the author of Religious Statecraft: The Politics of Islam in Iran (Columbia University Press, 2018) and is currently working on several projects on Iran’s regional policy, domestic politics, and nuclear strategy. Over the past two decades, his commentary has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and other major outlets. His academic work on the role of ideology and domestic politics in foreign policy and political violence has been published in Security Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Journal of Global Security Studies, and Perspectives on Politics, among others.

Mohammad received his Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University, an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Tehran.