Expert Profile



Dr Zaid Eyadat
Position(s) Advisor, Emirates Policy Center

Dr Zaid Eyadet is an Associate Fellow within the Global Fellowship Initiative of the GCSP. Zaid Eyadat is a professor of political science and human rights, and an expert on international and comparative politics. He is the founding chairperson of the Human Rights Department, which later became the Political Development Department, and the founding Dean of the Prince al-Hussein School of International Studies at the University of Jordan. His training and research interests are in the fields of International politics, Comparative politics, International political theory, Modelling and Game theory. He is a leading and distinguished expert on Middle East politics, Human Rights, and on Islam and Human Rights. His research has been published in many leading scholarly journals.

Some of his published articles and book chapters include “Minorities in the Arab World: Faults and Faults Lines,” “Islamic Feminism: Roots, Development, and Policies,” “The Calculus of Consensus: an Alternative Path to Arab Democracy,” “Fiqh Al-Aqalliyyât and the Arab Spring: Modern Islamic Theorizing,” “Public Reason and Islamic Reason in the Post-Secular,” “The Rationality of Political Violence: Modelling Al-Qaeda vs. the United States,” “A Transition Without Players: The Role of Political Parties in the Arab Revolutions,” and “Arab Revolutions of 2011: An Explanatory Model.” He is also the co-editor of the book Migration, Security, and Citizenship in the Middle East, and the co-translator of Count Bernadotte’s Mediation to Palestine 1948: Mediation and Assassination. He has just completed the translation of a book on Global Justice: Towards an International Theory of Human Rights.

He is currently engaged in several research projects, most importantly the Theory of Ethics in Islam, Islamic Theory of Human Rights and Islamic Theorizing on Sate and Politics. In this project, he seeks to address the lack of a fully developed ethical theory in Islam by investigating limitations in current Islamic theorizing on these topics and proposing a comprehensive theory of Islamic ethics that is compatible with modern conceptions of international human rights. Another book project he is currently involved in is Contemporary Arab Political Thought, examining the emergence of the different political strains in the Arab World since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and their interaction and impact on and positions in the political scene in the Middle East today.

Dr. Zaid Eyadat’s work spans the public, private, non-profit, and university settings. He has instructed, trained, and consulted in a number of organizations, local, national, and international, private and public (e.g., the Royal Hashemite Court, Emirates Policy Center, Creative Associates International, Global Foundation for Democracy and Development, Steering Committee in the Center for Ethics and Global Politics, the International Research Network on Religion and Democracy, and the Istanbul Seminar, part of the Reset Group and Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development). Currently, he is very involved in the development sector in specific, building efficient and effective public policy-making models to enable governments to respond better to urgent development needs and concerns in a sustainable manner.