Contributor
Geneive Abdo is a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC. She was most recently a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center. Her current research focuses on the shifting political and religious alliances within Shia communities in the Middle East. She has worked at several Washington-based think tanks, including the Atlantic Council and the Stimson Center. She was a non-resident scholar at the Brookings Institution from 2013-17. She was also a lecturer at the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University from 2016-19.
Her vast publications include monographs, books, and works in scholarly journals. Her newest publication is a chapter in the edited volume, The Gulf Cooperation Council at Forty: Risk and Opportunity in a Changing World (Brookings Press, 2023). Abdo is the author of four books on the Middle East, including The New Sectarianism: The Arab Uprisings and the Rebirth of the Shi’a-Sunni Divide (Oxford University Press, 2016). Her other books, also published by Oxford, include a groundbreaking study of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt. Abdo has received many awards for her scholarship, including the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Abdo also was the recipient of the Nieman Fellowship for study at Harvard University.
She was formerly the liaison officer for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, an initiative established by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, which aimed to improve relations between Islamic and Western societies. Before joining the U.N., Abdo was a foreign correspondent, where her 20-year career focused on coverage of the Middle East and the Muslim world. From 1998 to 2001, Abdo was the Iran correspondent for The Guardian and a regular contributor to The Economist and the International Herald Tribune. She was the first American journalist to be based in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Her thousands of articles and commentaries on Islam and the Middle East have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy Magazine, The Washington Post, and other publications. She is a frequent speaker at universities, think tanks, and international institutions in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.
For the first time since 2005, Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has no clear political role and no formal road map to get back into politics until elections are held again in 2025. So where does this leave him and the Sadrist movement?
Since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has played a key role in Iraq’s religious and political spheres, particularly as a staunch opponent of vilayet e-faqih.
Results from Iraq’s elections show that a determined young generation can organize and win seats, no matter the obstacles placed in the way by a political system most Iraqis lost faith in long ago.
AGSIW's Geneive Abdo spoke with Akeel Abbas, an expert on Iraqi politics and sectarian identities, to discuss the results of Iraq's October 10 parliamentary elections.
No matter the outcome, the October elections will show that a young generation has altered the political landscape in Iraq.
Muqtada al-Sadr’s announcement that he will boycott upcoming parliamentary elections has thrown the electoral process into disarray at a time when the future stability of Iraq depends on legitimate and transparent elections.
Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi’s arrest and detention of a powerful militia commander signals significant changes in Iraq as the country prepares for parliamentary elections.
A new generation of Iraqis fighting for a reimagining of their country have formed an informal alliance with Iraqi clerics – a radical departure from the trend in most Arab states.
The outcome of the upcoming parliamentary elections will be a test of clerical influence in Iraq and of the hold that protesters can continue to exert over Iraqi politics.
AGSIW experts explain what regional trends they’ll be following most closely as the year unfolds.
