Dr. Maro Youssef is a non-resident fellow at the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University. Her research focuses on women and politics, social movements, religion, and policy in the Middle East and North Africa. As an applied sociologist, she has shared her research findings with academics and policymakers. Dr. Youssef has briefed US officials, the UN, the Foreign Ministry of Canada, and think tanks on women’s rights and activism in North Africa. Her work has been published in Sociological Forum, Social Politics, Middle East Law and Governance, Project on Middle East Political Science, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Houston Chronicle, New Arab, and OpenDemocracy, among others.
She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA in Middle East Studies from the George Washington University, and a BA in history from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Youssef speaks Arabic, English, and French.
Dr. Youssef’s research broadly investigates women's rights and mobilization in authoritarian contexts and non-consolidated democracies. While at IMES, she will focus on two research projects based on data from Tunisia. The first focuses on women elites in Tunisia during the political transition that followed Ben Ali’s ouster, a blind spot in the social sciences. The second focuses on how new social movement organizations that emerge during democratization survive beyond a few years.