Rami Khouri
Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
Contact:
Email: rgkhouri@gmail.com
Experience
Rami George Khouri is a Palestinian-Jordanian and U.S. citizen whose family resides in Beirut, Amman, and Nazareth. He is director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. His journalistic work includes writing books and an internationally syndicated column, and he also serves as editor at large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper.
He spent the 2001–2002 academic year as a Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard University and was appointed a member of the Brookings Institution Task Force on US Relations with the Islamic World. He is a research associate at the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflict at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University (NY, USA), a Fellow of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (Jerusalem), and a member of the Leadership Council of the Harvard University Divinity School. He also serves on the board of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University.
He was executive editor of the Daily Star newspaper in 2003–2005, and before that had been editor-in-chief of the Jordan Times for seven years, when he also wrote for many years from Amman, Jordan for leading international publications, including the Financial Times, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post. For 18 years he was general manager of Al Kutba, Publishers, in Amman, and in recent years served as a consultant to the Jordanian tourism ministry on biblical archaeological sites. He has hosted programs on archaeology, history, and current public affairs on Jordan Television and Radio Jordan. He often comments on Mideast issues in the international media and lectures frequently at conferences and universities throughout the world.
He has BA and MSc degrees respectively in political science and mass communications from Syracuse University
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June 15, 2013
"Apocalyptic Words from Men in Hiding"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
"The fact that both [Former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri and Hezbollah Leader Hassan Nasrallah] must remain in hiding and cannot openly take a stroll among their compatriots in their lovely capital city, Beirut, reflects at one level the seriousness and dangers of this war. They both fear being assassinated, and for good reason: Several of their predecessors and warriors in arms in fact have been assassinated in recent years. This also mirrors the intensity and the stakes of the war, which both sides see as a zero-sum contest in which one side will win and the other will disappear from history."
June 12, 2013
"Insights Into Arab Youth Today"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
"Young Arabs continue to use the new public spheres that they created -- in civil society, on the street, in the communications world -- to achieve the full promises of their revolutions. Many of them define those promises in ways that far transcend merely the end of dictatorship and creating a functioning democracy, to include the central demands for “social justice,” citizen empowerment, equitable access to food and social services, more social trust and less polarization, and a voice in the shaping of the state and its values and policies."
June 11, 2013
"Qusayr Portends Great Danger, Waste and Stupidity for All"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
"Pro- and anti-Syria/Hezbollah groups in Lebanon have been quarreling and shooting each other for decades. That dynamic now will expand, as the Syrian and Lebanese arenas merge into a single battleground, fuelled by the active determination to fight for their survival by both Hezbollah and by Lebanese Salafists and others who see Hezbollah’s bold new militarism as spearheading Shiite-Iranian-Syrian domination of Lebanon. It remains unclear if Lebanon’s heightened tensions and shootouts will remain confined to traditional arenas in the north, northeast and south, or expand into Beirut and other regions."
June 6, 2013
"Turkey and Jordan Mirror the Citizen-State Challenge"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
The loose parallels between events in Jordan and Turkey reflect the wider reality across the Middle East of citizens and states that have not fully defined their relationships through a social contract that both shape and see as legitimate. We see this in every country in the region, without exception, in Arab countries that suffer their own modern legacy of dysfunctional statehood and citizenship, and in non-Arab Israel, Turkey and Iran.
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June 1, 2013
"Freedom of Expression Is Our Second Arab Battle"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
The battle for freedom of expression has been waged for decades in many Arab countries, but before the digital age the security-state mind-control colonels could isolate and expatriate those views they did not like and that did not conform to official propaganda, while controlling most of the information that citizens obtained through available public media. The digital age changed this, and millions of citizens can now access news and views from thousands of sources on their cell phones and mobile computers, breaking the monopoly on news and ideas that governments formerly enjoyed.
iStock Photo
May 28, 2013
"The New and the Ordinary in the Middle East"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
Every once in a while the Middle East region experiences a series of major and simultaneous developments in several different arenas, indicating that something important is taking place. We are passing through just such a moment this week, with quite dramatic developments in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine-Israel, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and several Arabian Peninsula states, without any sign of what is truly historic and new and what is a passing phenomenon.
May 22, 2013
"Hezbollah's Moment of Reckoning in Qusayr"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
The battle for Qusayr is only the haphazard spark within the larger Syrian war that could ignite this fire. The real causes of this combustible condition of the Arab region remain the dysfunction of modern Arab states and central governments, the ascendancy of police states and military regimes, the repercussions of the century-long Zionism-Arabism conflict, and the continuing status of the Middle East as a proxy battleground for regional and foreign powers.
May 18, 2013
"When Arab States and Citizens Differ on Palestine"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
"Tensions between the Arab state and its citizens will expand in the years ahead, as the fundamental contradictions of Arab state-building, national identity, regional relations, the Arabism-Zionism confrontation, and international alliances all clash visibly. Jordan and Egypt provide the clearest examples because of their peace treaties with Israel, but they are not unique. Most other Arab states suffer similar contradictions and stresses, especially Levantine and Gulf states that must satisfy American-Israeli demands that contradict the sentiments of many of those Arab states’ own citizens."
May 14, 2013
"New Rules of the Evolving Arab Order"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
The uprisings that erupted across the region as of December 2010 have been the single most important sign of a region-wide malaise that was gnawing at the core of Arab countries for decades, signaled in its earlier stages in the 1980s-90s by the rise of mass Islamist movements that reflected widespread citizen discontent and challenged autocratic governments. The evolving regional order is now entering its most dynamic stage of change, with every component element transforming into something new.
Wikimedia Commons
May 10, 2013
"China Addresses the Middle East"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
The Israeli settlement news is nothing new, but the actions of the three big powers are new and noteworthy. The American, Russian and Chinese initiatives to resolve the Arab-Israeli and Syrian conflicts are as laudatory as they are difficult to achieve, though efforts like this open up new possibilities for collaborative diplomacy through the UN Security Council, which is usually critical for success.
