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He is a senior associate in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He focuses on security affairs, civil-military relations, and identity politics in North Africa and the Gulf. His commentary and articles appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic, and the Financial Times. He routinely briefs U.S. and European government officials on Middle East affairs and has testified before the United States Senate and the House of Representatives. He is the author of a book exploring Sunni-Shi’a relations in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, entitled Sectarian Politics in the Gulf: From the Iraq War to the Arab Uprisings (Columbia University Press, 2013), which was named one of 2014’s Top Three Books on the Middle East by Foreign Affairs magazine. Prior to joining Carnegie, he was a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. He holds a doctorate in International Relations from Oxford University and a Master’s in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. He studied Arabic at Cairo University, the University of Jordan, and the Yemen Language Center in Sana’a.