Ali Fathollah-Nejad is a German-Iranian political scientist focusing on Iran, the Middle East, and the post-unipolar world order. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Department of Development Studies at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) and was the winner of 2016/17 post-doctoral fellowship of the Harvard Kennedy School's Iran Project. He is an affiliated researcher with the Centre d'Études de la Coopération Internationale et du Développement (CECID) at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Freie Universität (FU) Berlin's Center for Middle Eastern and North African Politics and the Afro-Middle East Centre (AMEC), South Africa's think-tank specialized on the Middle East. Most recently, he was Senior Lecturer in Middle East and Comparative Politics at the University of Tübingen and adjunct Assistant Professor in the Ph.D. program of Qatar University's Gulf Studies Center. Ali is also the former Iran expert of the Brookings Institution inDoha (BDC, 2017-20) and the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP, 2015-18). In 2020, he published two monographs: The Islamic Republic of Iran Four Decades On: The 2017/18 Protests Amid a Triple Crisis and The Politics of Culture in Times of Rapprochement: European Cultural and Academic Exchange with Iran (2015-16).