Ambassador Feisal Amin Rasoul al-Istrabadi is a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. He is the founding director of the Center for the Study of the Middle East, a National Resource Center, at Indiana University Bloomington, where he is also professor of the practice of international law and diplomacy at the Maurer School of Law and the School of Global and International Studies. He is a professor by courtesy at IUB’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Istrabadi focuses his research on the processes of building legal and political institutions in countries in transition from dictatorship to democracy. He recently co-edited The Future of ISIS: Regional and International Implications with Sumit Ganguly.

Istrabadi is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He is a non-resident fellow in law at the Iraq Energy Institute.

From 2004-10 Istrabadi served as ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary and deputy permanent representative of Iraq to the United Nations (on leave after 2007). Prior to his diplomatic appointment, he served as a legal advisor to the Iraqi minister for foreign affairs during the negotiations for U.N. Security Council Resolution 1546 of June 8, 2004, which recognized the reassertion by Iraq of its sovereignty. He was also principal legal drafter of Iraq’s interim constitution, the Law of Administration of the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period. Before contributing to the reconstruction of Iraq, Istrabadi was a practicing trial lawyer in the United States for 15 years, with approximately 70 civil trials in federal and state courts, focusing on civil rights, employment discrimination, and constitutional torts.