Jean-Loup Samaan is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative, focusing on Middle Eastern strategic affairs and the evolution of the Gulf security system, and in particular, the Israel-Hezbollah conflict.

Currently, he serves as a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute. Prior to that, Samaan was a policy analyst at the Directorate for Strategic Affairs of the French Ministry of Defense from 2008 to 2011, research advisor at the NATO Defense College from 2011 to 2016, and associate professor in strategic studies detached by the US Near East South Asia Center to the UAE National Defense College from 2016 to 2021.

His most recent book (co-authored with Frédéric Grare), The Indian Ocean as a New Political and Security Region, looks at the changing geostrategic environment in the Indian Ocean region. Samaan has authored four other books and several articles and monographs for various international academic and policy journals such as Survival, Orbis, Comparative Strategy, Parameters, Politique Etrangère, and the International Spectator.

He regularly gives lectures to civilian and military audiences in various countries and has been providing expertise to governments, international organizations, and private companies.

Samaan is a former student of Arabic at the French Institute of Oriental Languages and the French Institute for the Near East in Beirut, Lebanon. He graduated from the Institute for Political Studies in Grenoble, holds a PhD in political science from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and has accreditation to supervise research from Sciences Po, Paris.