Bessma Momani

Dr. Bessma Momani is Full Professor in the Department of Political Science. She is a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States’ Institute in Washington, DC, and a Fulbright Scholar. She was interim Assistant Vice-President, International at the University of Waterloo, a 2015 fellow of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and also previously served as a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC, and was a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Mortara Center. She has worked as a consultant to the International Monetary Fund, both in the communications office and the Independent Evaluation Office. Bessma currently serves as an adviser to the National Security Transparency Advisory Group at Public Safety Canada.

Bessma has received a number of awards and prizes for her research and work. She has been awarded multiple Insight Development Grants, Insight Grants, and Connection Grants funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. She is currently the director of a three-year-funded Department of National Defence network called the Defence and Security Foresight Group tasked with providing policy-relevant advice to the Department of National Defence. In recent years, Bessma spearheaded the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation’s Pluralism Project which explored the link between Canadian diversity and economic prosperity. This has led to further work on bringing visible minority women into the Canadian economy.

Bessma has authored, co-authored and co-edited more than ten books. In addition, she has written more than 80 peer-reviewed academic articles or book chapters that examine international organizations, international political economy, gender and diversity, political economy of the Middle East and geopolitics of the Middle East

As a frequent media and political analyst on the Middle East, international affairs and the global economy, Bessma has written editorials in The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, the Economist, the National Post and the Toronto Star. She is also a regular media contributor, having done thousands of live broadcast interviews, with CNN, CBC News, CTV, Al Jazeera, CGTN, TRT World and BNN Bloomberg.