Dr. Zaid Al Ali

Biography

Zaid Al-Ali was born in Madrid in 1977 and spent ten years of his life in New York and another ten in London. His family originates from Baghdad, Iraq. With the onset of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, his father, who was Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, resigned in protest, which forced the entire family into exile in 2003. Zaid graduated with law degrees from King's College London in 1997, Université de Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne) in 1999, and Harvard Law School in 2001. He began his legal career at Shearman & Sterling LLP, practicing international commercial and investment arbitration in their Paris and London offices. In February 2005, he moved to the Middle East to work for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq as a legal adviser in the Office of Constitutional Support, tasked with providing advice to the Iraqi constitutional drafting committee. After the drafting process ended, he continued to work on parliamentary and judicial reform in Iraq, collaborating closely with legal advisers in key state positions to enhance the parliament's oversight capacity and improve the efficiency of the courts. By 2010, Zaid shifted his focus to efforts in constitutional reform in the Arab region, with specific interest in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen. He has published widely in the international press, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and al-Jazeera, and has been a quoted expert on constitutional reform issues in Iraq and the broader Arab region.

Research Interests