Anoush Ehteshami

Anoush Ehteshami is a nonresident senior fellow with the Transatlantic Project at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs. He is professor of international relations at Durham University, where he has taught since 1993, and director of the university’s al-Sabah Research Programme in International Relations, Regional Politics, and Security since 2011.

From 2016 to 2022, Ehteshami served as director of Durham’s Institute for Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies, where he had earlier been director of postgraduate studies and, from 1998 to 2002, director and chairman of the Board of Studies. In 2004, he founded and led Durham’s School of Government and International Affairs for five years, building it into one of Britain’s leading departments of politics and international studies. He went on to serve as the university’s first dean of internationalization from 2009 to 2011.

Before joining Durham, Ehteshami was a lecturer and research fellow at the University of Exeter, where he also directed the Middle East Politics Programme. Earlier in his career, he co-founded and served as managing editor of the Middle East Strategic Studies Quarterly and editor of the Gulf Report at the Gulf Centre for Strategic Studies in London.

Ehteshami’s research focuses on international relations, political economy, and strategic studies of the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, with recent work centered on the changing balance of power in Asia, EU/US-Middle East relations, and the international politics of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. He is the author or editor of more than two dozen books, including Iran: Stuck in Transition (2017), Dynamics of Change in the Persian Gulf (2013), and China Moves West: The Evolving Strategies of the Belt and Road Initiative (2024), along with numerous articles in journals such as International Affairs, the Middle East Journal, and Middle East Policy.

He has advised organizations including the World Economic Forum, the European Commission, the US State Department, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the RAND Corporation, and has given oral evidence to the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee on multiple occasions. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Academy of Social Sciences and holds a PhD in politics and international relations from the University of Exeter.