FPRI Names its New Cohort of Robert A. Fox Fellows

• Benedetta Berti
• Adam Garfinkle
• Samuel Helfont
• Vish Sakthivel
• Clint Watts
• June 15, 2016

FPRI’s Middle East program is proud to announce that it has named five Robert A. Fox Fellows, who will spend the year writing and speaking on a wide range of issues related to the Middle East and North Africa, and U.S. policy therein. Sponsored by Robert A. Fox, these Fellows have been chosen on the basis of their erudite scholarly contributions, and their ability to respond to contemporary developments in the region in a sound and timely fashion, based on FPRI’s focus on geopolitical analysis. This mark the second year (2016-2017) of the fellowship, which is being awarded to two new scholars and renewed for an additional year for three existing Robert A. Fox Fellows. They are: 

Benedetta Berti is a Robert A. Fox Fellow, a foreign policy and security researcher, author, and lecturer. Her work focuses on human security and internal conflicts, on post-conflict stabilization and peacebuilding. Dr. Berti is the author of three books, including Armed Political Organizations: From Conflict to Integration (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) and her work has appeared, among others, in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Al-Jazeera. She is a Fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), a TED Senior Fellow, and an independent human security consultant. In 2015 the Italian government awarded her the Order of the Star of Italy (order of Knighthood).

 

Adam Garfinkle is a Robert A. Fox Fellow and founding editor of The American Interest. Before founding The American Interest in 2005, he served in 2003-05 as principal speechwriter to the Secretary of State (S/P, Policy Planning). He has also been editor of The National Interest and has taught at the School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College and other institutions of higher learning.

 

Samuel Helfont is a Robert A. Fox Fellow and post-doctoral lecturer of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote his dissertation on Saddam Hussein’s use of religion to entrench his authoritarian regime, based on captured Ba’th Party and Iraqi state records. Helfont is the author of Yusuf Al-Qaradawi: Islam and Modernity (The Moshe Dayan Center/Tel Aviv University Press, 2009) and has written widely in publications such as The Middle East Journal, Foreign Affairs, Orbis: FPRI’s Journal of World Affairs, The New Republic, and The Jewish Review of Book, among others.

 

Vish Sakthivel is a Robert A. Fox Fellow focusing on North Africa. She is also a doctoral candidate in Modern Middle East Studies at Oxford University, where she is writing her dissertation on Islamist politics in Algeria and Morocco. She is also a nonresident adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), and is the author of the WINEP monograph, “Al-Adl wal-Ihsan: Inside Morocco’s Islamist Challenge.” Her work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, World Politics Review, Al Monitor, the Oxford University Press Islamic Encyclopedia, among other outlets.

 

Clint Watts is a Robert A. Fox Fellow and the President of Miburo Solutions, Inc. His research focuses on analyzing transnational threat groups operating in local environments on a global scale. Before starting Miburo Solutions, he served as a U.S. Army infantry officer, a FBI Special Agent on a Joint Terrorism Task Force, and as the Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC). He is also the editor of the SelectedWisdom.com blog and a frequent contributor to FPRI’s blog, Geopoliticus.