Negar Razavi

Editor, Arab Center Washington DC

Negar Razavi is the editor at ACW. Trained as a political anthropologist, Razavi comes to this position with a background in publishing, university scholarship, and policy research. For more than a decade, her own research has explored questions around expertise, geopolitics, security, US foreign policy, and gender in the Middle East broadly and Iran specifically. Her first book, The Geopolitics of Expertise (Stanford University Press, 2027), examines the role of policy experts in sustaining America’s confrontation with the Islamic Republic of Iran, culminating in the 2026 war on Iran.

Prior to joining ACW, Razavi was an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies and an ACLS Emerging Voices postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern. She has also held faculty positions at American University, the College of William and Mary, and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, Razavi has been a Senior Researcher at Security in Context, the Iran co-editor at Jadaliyya, and a Public Outreach fellow at SAPIENS. Razavi holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, an M​Sc in social anthropology from the University of Oxford (St. Antony’s College), and a BA in history and peace and justice studies from Tufts.