Joost Hiltermann is Special Adviser to the Middle East & North Africa Program at the International Crisis Group, and was MENA Program Director in 2015-2025. Earlier, he was Executive Director of Human Rights Watch’s Arms Division (1994-2002), and Research Coordinator at the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq in Ramallah. He holds a Sociology PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is author of A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja (Cambridge, 2007), and Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women's Movements in the Occupied Territories (Princeton, 1991). He has written for The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, and other publications;and has taught at Georgetown, Johns Hopkins SAIS and the University of Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies. His novel “The Resurrected” was published by Afsana Press in the UK in 2026;it’s the fictionalised story of Kurdish genocide survivors in Iraq in the late 1980s.