Islam and Politics - The Stimson Center

Appendix 1:
Author Biographies
Amit Pandya directs the Regional Voices: Transnational Challenges project. He has previously
been Counsel to the Government Operations and Foreign Affairs Committees of
the House of Representatives, and held senior positions at the Departments of Defense and
State and at the US Agency for International Development. He is a South Asia expert and
international lawyer, and was formerly an ethnographer and teacher. He holds degrees from
Oxford, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and Georgetown.
Khalid Rahman is Director General of the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), a position he
has served in since 1982. He has vast experience in research, training, and management,
which has significantly contributed into turning IPS into a dynamic think tank. Mr. Rahman
has conducted over 400 seminars and roundtables organized by IPS and has been involved
in organizing both its research and training programs. He is also invited by various research
and training institutions as Master Trainer. The main focus of his research has been on
national and regional politics. He has 19 publications and a number of papers to his credit.
He is also editor of the IPS periodical Policy Perspectives. Mr. Rahman is on the board of
a number of social and development organizations and contributes frequently on current
affairs. He received his master’s degree in economics from the University of Punjab.
Diaa Rashwan is Director of the Program for the Study of Islamist Movements and the
Comparative Politics Unit at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies (ACPSS)
in Cairo. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Guide of World Islamist Movements, published
annually by the ACPSS since 2006, and Director of the Egyptian Legislative Reform project
at the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights. Dr. Rashwan is currently a member of
the scientific committee of Rivista di Intelligence at the Centro Studi Internazionali, and
member of the Advisory Board of the Program for the Study and Research of Terrorism at
Cairo University. Previously, he served as Managing Editor at the ACPSS of the State of
Religions in Egypt, published annually from 1995 to 1999. Dr. Rashwan started his career
as a political science researcher at the ACPSS in 1982, and accepted visiting research fellowships
at other centers and institutes in France, Finland, and Japan. Among other publications,
he edited The Spectrum of Islamist Movements (2007).
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