Gulf Research Meeting
Karen Young
Dr. Karen Young is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she studies the political economy of the Middle East, with a special focus on the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. She is a professorial lecturer at George Washington University. Before joining AEI, she served as senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, a research and visiting fellow at the Middle East Centre of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an assistant professor of political science at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. She led a seminar on the emerging markets of the Middle East and North Africa at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies from 2018-2020. In addition to being published in a variety of policy journals, Dr. Young has written analysis and commentary for the popular press, including Al-Monitor, Bloomberg Opinion, the Financial Times, Lawfare, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. She has been interviewed by Al Jazeera, BBC News, CBC (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), CBS News, CNBC Arabia, and National Public Radio, among other networks. Dr. Young has also contributed numerous chapters to edited volumes and authored “The Political Economy of Energy, Finance and Security in the United Arab Emirates: Between the Majilis and the Market” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Dr. Young obtained a PhD in political science from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has twice been awarded a Fulbright fellowship: once to Ecuador, where she received an MA in international economic relations from the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Quito, and later to Bulgaria. Earlier she earned an MA in political science from Columbia University and a BA in anthropology from Wellesley College.
