Holding the Line or Shifting Course? GCC Responses One Month Into the War
Featured Speakers: Dr. Courtney Freer, Dr. Khalid Al-Jaber, Mohammed Baharoon, and Dr. Mohammad Alrumaihi
Bios:
Dr. Courtney Freer (Moderator)
Assistant Professor, Emory University; Senior Non-Resident Fellow, Gulf International Forum
Courtney Freer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University and a senior nonresident fellow at the Gulf International Forum. Her academic work focuses on domestic politics and Islamism in the Gulf states; she is the author of Rentier Islamism: The Influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gulf Monarchies (Oxford University Press, 2018), The Resilience of Parliamentary Politics in Kuwait: Rentierism, Ideology, and Mobilization (Oxford University Press, 2024) and co-author with Alanoud al-Sharekh of Tribalism and Political Power in the Gulf: State-Building and National Identity in Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE (IB Tauris, 2021). Courtney holds a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University, an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from The George Washington University, and. DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford. She has held positions at the US-Saudi Arabian Business Council, Brookings Doha Center, and the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Dr. Khalid Al-Jaber
Executive Director, Middle East Council on Global Affairs
Khalid Al-Jaber is the Executive Director of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs. He is a distinguished scholar and practitioner specializing in political communication and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) affairs. Al Jaber has held prominent leadership positions, including Director of Al-Sharq Studies & Research Center and Editor-in-Chief of The Peninsula, Qatar’s leading English-language daily newspaper.
He also served as an Assistant Professor of Political Communication in the Gulf Studies Program at Qatar University, where he made significant contributions to the academic and policy discourse on regional and international issues.
Al-Jaber’s research focuses on the Gulf and MENA region, with expertise spanning political science, public diplomacy, international communications, and international relations. He is the author and editor of several books and numerous scholarly articles.
He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Leicester, a Master’s degree from the University of West Florida, and postgraduate diplomas from Fordham University, Stanford University, and Georgetown University.
Mohammed Baharoon
Director General, Dubai Public Policy Research Center (b’huth)
Mohammed Baharoon is the Director General of the Dubai Public Policy Research Center (b’huth), established in 2002 in Dubai. He pursued a career in media as a reporter for Al Arabi Magazine and Al Ittihad newspaper, and then as an editor for Gulf Defence Magazine before moving into public policy research. Mr. Baharoon focuses his research on the interplay between geostrategy and policymaking in governance, stability, capacity building, and future-proofing within the Middle East, and has worked as Deputy Director of Watani, the UAE’s first initiative on national identity. As head of b’huth, he has established himself as one of the Gulf’s leading voices on regional policy and geopolitical affairs, regularly contributing to international discourse on Middle Eastern strategic issues.
Dr. Mohammad Alrumaihi
Member of the Board of Directors, Gulf International Forum; Professor of Sociology, Kuwait University
Dr. Mohammad Alrumaihi is a member of the Board of Directors at Gulf International Forum and a professor of Sociology at Kuwait University. Previously, he was an advisor to the Kuwaiti Cabinet and served as the General Secretary of the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters (NCCAL) in Kuwait between 1998 and 2011. Dr. Alrumaihi is the founder and editor-in-chief for daily and monthly publications, and an advisor on various committees on education, journalism, culture, and politics for the Kuwaiti government and private institutions in the Gulf region. Dr. Alrumaihi is a member of the board of the Diplomatic Institute in the Kuwait Foreign Affairs Ministry, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, and Babtain Cultural Foundation. He has written extensively on political sociology and social change in the Gulf region, and cultural changes of Arab world. He has published more than twenty-five books. Dr. Alrumaihi served as the Editor in Chief of Awan, a daily Kuwaiti newspaper. Before that, the Editor-in-Chief of AlArabi Magazine.
Previously, Dr. Alrumaihi served as a member of the Advisory Board for the Council of Ministers headed by Kuwait Prime Minister, member of a number of working commissions on education and higher education in the Kuwaiti government, member of the Gulf Studies Center Advisory Board at the American University of Kuwait and member of the Austrian College in Kuwait, as well serving in prize and publication committees of KFAS.