Leila Farsakh

Who is Leila Farsakh?

Leila Farsakh is a Palestinian political economist who was born in Jordan and is an Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts Boston. Her area of expertise is Middle East Politics, Comparative Politics, and the Politics of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Farsakh holds a MPhil from the University of Cambridge, UK and a PhD from the University of London.

Farsakh conducted post-doctoral research at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and is also a research affiliate at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She has worked with a number of organizations, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris and the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute in Ramallah.

In 2001 she won the Peace and Justice Award from the Cambridge Peace Commission in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Farsakh is the Project Co-Director for Jerusalem 2050, a problem-solving project jointly sponsored by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Center for International Studies.