Berkley Center

Yasmine Farouk is a visiting fellow in the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where her research focuses on Saudi Arabia and regional foreign relations. Prior to joining Carnegie, Yasmine was based in Egypt where she taught political science. She previously worked at the office of the Egyptian prime minister after the 2011 revolution supporting civil society participation in the national dialogue and constitution making processes.

Dr. Stacey Gutkowski is a senior lecturer in conflict studies in the Department of War Studies and co-director of the Centre for the Study of Divided Societies at King's College London. Dr. Gutkowski is the author of Religion, War and Israel’s Secular Millennials: Being Reasonable? (2020) and Secular War: Myths of Religion, Politics and Violence (2013). Her regional concentration is the Middle East, with a particular focus on Jordan and Israel/Palestine.

Peter Mandaville is a professor of international affairs at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, where he also serves as the director of the AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies. He was a Berkley Center senior research fellow from April 2018 to April 2024 and from 2022 to 2024 served as a senior advisor on religion and inclusive societies at the United States Institute of Peace. Previous government experience includes serving as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff (2011-2012) and as a senior advisor in the department’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs (2015-2016). He has also been a visiting senior fellow at the Pew Research Center. His research focuses on the intersection of religion and international affairs, with a primary focus on Islam and the Muslim world. His publications include, among others, The Geopolitics of Religious Soft Power: How States Use Religion in Foreign Policy (2023),  Wahhabism and the World (2022), Islam and Politics (2014, 2020), Global Political Islam (2007), and Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma (2001). He holds degrees from the University of St. Andrews and the University of Kent and has studied at the American University in Cairo.

Ani Sarkissian is an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University (MSU). A core faculty member of MSU’s Muslim Studies Program and Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, her research focuses on comparing and investigating the role of religion in politics in countries around the world. Her book The Varieties of Religious Repression: Why Governments Restrict Religion (2015) examines how and why authoritarian regimes use religious restrictions as an instrument of their rule. She is currently drafting a book manuscript on state support for religion in authoritarian countries. From 2014 to 2016, she was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project. Sarkissian received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006, where she received grants from the National Science Foundation and IREX to develop her dissertation on religion and democratization.

Annelle R. Sheline is a research fellow for the Middle East at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a non-resident fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. Her research focuses on religious authority in the Middle East, examining the intersection of religious and national identities in the Arab monarchies, and emphasizes implications for combating violent extremism.

Ann Wainscott is an assistant professor of political science at Miami University. Previously she served as the American Academy of Religion Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. She is the author of Bureaucratizing Islam: Morocco and the War on Terror (2017).