Dr. Abbas Kadhim is a resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Iraq Initiative. Previously, Kathim led the Iraq Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs until July 2025. He is an Iraq expert and author of Reclaiming Iraq: The 1920 Revolution and the Founding of the Modern State. Most recently, he was a senior foreign policy fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He was formerly an assistant professor of national security affairs and Middle East studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University. He also previously held a senior government affairs position at the Iraqi Embassy in Washington, DC. His books include Governance in the Middle East and North Africa and The Hawza Under Siege: Studies in the Ba’th Party Archive. He earned a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.