TwitterGeneive Abdo is a senior resident scholar at the Arabia Foundation, a think tank in Washington, D.C. She is also a lecturer at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. Abdo is the author of four books, including The New Sectarianism: The Arab Uprisings and the Rebirth of the Shi’a-Sunni Divide, just published by Oxford University Press. She specializes in issues regarding political Islam.
She has received many awards for her scholarship, including a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship. Abdo was formerly the liaison officer for the Alliance of Civilizations, a UN initiative established by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, which aims to improve relations between Islamic and Western societies.
Before joining the United Nations, 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 British newspaper 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.