Yasmina Abouzzohour was a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs until 2023 and is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Middle East Initiative at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She specializes in authoritarian persistence and transition, focusing on regime-opposition interrelations during upheavals.

Abouzzohour is currently completing a book project on Arab monarchical survival in which she uses mixed methods to investigate the causal mechanisms that allow monarchs to contain different types of dissent. Her other research explores the impact of new forms of contestation on state-society relations in North Africa and the Gulf, and the economic and political implications of states’ institutional and policy responses to COVID-19. Abouzzohour has experience in public-policy research and advising nonprofits, intergovernmental organizations, government agencies, and other stakeholders. She joined the Brookings Institute in 2019 and the European Council on Foreign Relations in 2021.

Abouzzohour holds a PhD from the University of Oxford and a BA from Columbia University, both in political science. Her research received funding and accolades from the American Political Science Association, the Project on Middle East Political Science, the University of Oxford, the Middle East Studies Association, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies.