Michael Wahid Hanna

Non-Resident Senior Fellow

Michael Wahid Hanna is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law. He is the U.S. Program Director at the International Crisis Group. Before this role, he was a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation in New York. Hanna works on issues of international security, international law and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia. He is the co-editor of Arab Politics Beyond the Uprisings: Experiments in an Era of Resurgent Authoritarianism (2017) and Order from Ashes: New Foundations for Security in the Middle East (2018).

He has published widely on U.S. foreign policy in newspapers and journals, including articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, The New Republic, Democracy, Middle East Report, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Survival and World Policy Journal, among other publications. He appears regularly on PBS, BBC and NPR, including appearances on Charlie Rose and the PBS NewsHour.

Hanna directed The Century Foundation’s 2015 International Working Group on Pakistan, chaired by Ambassador Thomas Pickering, and served as a co-director of The Century Foundation’s 2011 International Task Force on Afghanistan, co-chaired by Ambassador Pickering and Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi.

He served as a consultant for Human Rights Watch in Baghdad in 2008. Prior to joining The Century Foundation, Hanna was a senior fellow at the International Human Rights Law Institute. From 1999 to 2004, Hanna practiced corporate law with the New York law firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. Fluent in Arabic, he was a Fulbright Scholar at Cairo University. He received a JD from New York University School of Law, where he was an editor of the Law Review. Hanna is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Follow him on Twitter @mwhanna1.