Professor Sultan Barakat

GRM 2022 Workshop: Gulf State donors across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus

Founding Director - Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies

​​​Sultan Barakat is the Founding Director of the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies and a professor in conflict and post-war recovery studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.  Previously he served as Director of Research at the Brookings Doha Centre. At the University of York, he founded and led the Post-war Reconstruction and Development Unit​between 1993 and 2019. Professor Barakat designed and launched York’s very successful Master programmes in Post-war Recovery Studies, and International Humanitarian Affairs (Online).​ In 2016 he founded the MSc Program in Conflict Management and Humanitarian Action at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar.  Barakat has been published widely, his most recent book, Understanding Influence: The Use of Statebuilding Research in British Policy was published by Ashgate in 2014. Barakat has over 30 years of professional experience working on issues of conflict management, humanitarian response, and post-conflict recovery and transition. He is regularly engaged in providing guidance as a Senior Adviser and Consultant to the United Nations, the World Bank, European Union, DFID, ILO, IFRC and a variety of governments and international non-governmental organizations including CARE and Oxfam.  He has led major evaluations and programming initiatives in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Egypt, Jordan, Kosovo, Lebanon, Libya, Nepal, Palestine, Philippines (Mindanao), Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan (Darfur), Syria, Uganda (Moyo and Adjumani) and Yemen. Professor Barakat serves on the Advisory Board of the Humanitarian Policy Group at the Overseas Development Institute in London. He is a member of the joint Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) Commissioning Panel for research on poverty reduction. Barakat was one of the founding Expert Panel Members of the Global Peace Index where he served between 2008 and 2014. Most recently, Barakat has co-led Track I and Track II mediation efforts in Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan.