Atlantic Council

Biography

Michele Dunne

Michele Dunne is director of the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.

Dr. Dunne has served in the White House on the National Security Council staff, on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and in its Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and as a diplomat in Cairo and Jerusalem. Prior to joining the Atlantic Council, she was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she edited the Arab Reform Bulletin and carried out research on Arab politics and U.S. policies. She holds a doctorate in Arabic language and linguistics from Georgetown University, where she has served as a visiting professor of Arabic and Arab Studies. Her research interests include Arab politics, political transitions, economic reform, Egypt, Israeli-Palestinian issues, and U.S. and European policies in the Middle East.  She co-chairs the Working Group on Egypt, a bipartisan group of experts established in February 2010 to mobilize U.S. government attention to the forces of change in that country.

Selected publications include “Egypt’s Democratic Transition: Five Myths about the Economy and International Assistance” (Legatum Institute and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2011), “Egypt: From Stagnation to Revolution” (in America’s Challenges in the Greater Middle East, Palgrave McMillan 2011); “The Baby, the Bathwater, and the Freedom Agenda in the Middle East” (Washington Quarterly, 2009); “Incumbent Regimes and the ‘King’s Dilemma’ in the Arab World: Promise and Threat of Managed Reform” (with Marina Ottaway, in Getting to Pluralism, Carnegie Endowment, 2009); “A Post-Pharaonic Egypt?” (American Interest, 2008); and “The Ups and Downs of Political Reform in Egypt” (with Amr Hamzawy, in Beyond the Façade: Political Reform in the Arab World, 2008), and Democracy in Contemporary Egyptian Political Discourse (John Benjamins, 2003).