Bassma Kodmani

Bassma is an IFIT Senior Fellow and a member of IFIT’s International Advisory Council. She is also an Associate Professor of International Relations at Paris University.

Bassma is a co-founder of the Arab Reform Initiative and its former Executive Director from 2005 to mid-2019. She has served as a senior adviser on international cooperation at the French National Research Council (2007-09), Associate Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po (2006-07), an adviser to the director of the Académie Diplomatique Internationale (2007-2009) and Senior Visiting Fellow at the Collège de France (2005-06).

From 1998 to 2005, Bassma was the head of the Governance and International Cooperation program at the Ford Foundation office for the Middle East and North Africa in Cairo where she was in charge of support to research institutions, NGOs, and public agencies in the region. From 1981 to 1998, she established and directed the Middle East Program at the Institut Français des Relations Internationales (IFRI) in Paris. In 2011-2012, she took a temporary leave from the Arab Reform Initiative to take on a mission as Head of Foreign Relations and spokesperson with the Syrian National Council, the opposition coalition seeking democratic change in Syria. She resigned from that role in 2012. In 2016, she joined the delegation of the democratic opposition in the Geneva peace talks on Syria and served as a member of the Syrian Constitutional Committee. She is also the co-founder of GLOBAL SYRIA, an initiative of the Syrian diaspora to connect and leverage Syrian assets for the benefit of the reconstruction of Syria.

Bassma holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Sciences-Po in Paris. She has authored books, reports, and articles on conflicts in the Middle East, regional security, political developments in Arab societies, security institutions, religious authority and political authority in the Muslim world and the question of Palestine. Her book on the Palestinian Diaspora (in French) was awarded the prize of Association France-Palestine in 1998. She regularly lectures in Arab and European academic institutions and policy forums. Bassma is a member of the Advisory Boards of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Middle East Center, and the Euro-Med Foundation for Human Rights. Prior to that she served on the board of the United Nations University in Tokyo and on the advisory board of International IDEA. She was awarded the Légion d’Honneur of France as Chevalier in 2012, and the Raymond Georis Prize for Innovative Philanthropy in 2011 for her role in developing the Arab Reform Initiative and promoting democracy in the context of the Arab Spring.

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Bassma Kodmani

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