Jean-Loup Samaan is a senior research fellow at the Middle East Institute of the National University of Singapore, as well as a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative. He is also an associate research fellow with the French Institute of International Relations. His research covers Middle Eastern security affairs, in particular the reforms of Gulf armed forces, Israel’s evolving military strategy, and the evolution of non-state warfare in the region.

Prior to that, Samaan was a policy analyst at the Directorate for Strategic Affairs of the French Ministry of Defense (2008-2011), research advisor at the NATO Defense College (2011-2016), and associate professor in strategic studies detached by the US Near East South Asia Center to the UAE National Defense College (2016-2021).

His most recent book, New Military Strategies in the Gulf, was published by I.B. Tauris in August 2023 and looks at the evolving defense policies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Dr. Samaan has authored five other books and several articles and monographs for various international academic and policy journals such as Survival, Orbis, Comparative Strategy, Parameters, the Middle East Journal, and The International Spectator. He regularly gives lectures to civilian and military audiences in various countries and has been providing expertise to governments, international organisations as well as private companies. Dr. Samaan is a former student of Arabic at the French Institute of Oriental Languages and the French Institute for the Near East in Beirut, Lebanon. He graduated from the Institute for Political Studies in Grenoble, and he holds a Ph.D. in political science (2009) from the University of Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne as well as an accreditation to supervise research (2017) from the doctoral school of Sciences Po, Paris.