Courtney Freer

Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow, Emory University

Courtney Freer is the provost’s postdoctoral fellow at Emory University. She served as an assistant professorial research fellow at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 2015-20. She is also a nonresident fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution.

Her academic work focuses on the domestic politics of the Gulf Arab states and Islamism. She received her DPhil in politics from the University of Oxford in 2015, having written a thesis revising rentier state theory by examining the sociopolitical role played by Muslim Brotherhood groups in Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The findings of this work were published by Oxford University Press in 2018 as Rentier Islamism: The Influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gulf Monarchies. She previously worked at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar and the U.S.-Saudi Business Council in Washington, DC. Freer holds a BA in Near Eastern studies from Princeton University and an MA in Middle Eastern studies from the George Washington University.

Book Launch: Kinship, State Formation and Governance in the Arab Gulf States

On Thursday July 7, AGSIW hosted a discussion on Scott Weiner's new publication examining tribe-state relations in the Gulf.

Book Launch – Tribalism and Political Power in the Gulf: State-Building and National Identity in Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE

On December 1, AGSIW hosted a discussion examining the roles that tribes play in popular participation in government and policymaking in the Gulf.

What to Expect From Qatar's First Legislative Elections

On September 30, AGSIW hosted a discussion ahead of Qatar's first legislative elections.

Publications content-type in which the post is published

The Changing Islamist Landscape of the Gulf Arab States

Independent political movements, Islamist or otherwise, are often overlooked in the Gulf Arab states that benefit from substantial incomes due to oil wealth.

Blog Post content-type in which the post is published

Pessimism of the Kuwaiti Opposition in the Face of Upcoming Elections

If held as scheduled in June 2017, Kuwait’s legislative elections would mark the end of the first Kuwaiti Parliament to serve its full four-year term since 2003.