Bio
Dr. Khalid Mustafa Medani is Associate Professor of Political Science and Islamic Studies where he is also Chair of the African Studies Program at McGill. He has also taught at Oberlin College and Stanford University. Dr. Medani received a B.A. with Honors in Development Studies from Brown University, an M.A. in Development Studies from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on globalization, and the political economy of Islamist and Ethnic Politics in Africa and the Middle East with a special focus on Sudan, Egypt, and Somalia. Dr. Medani is the author of Black Markets and Militants: Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2021) which received an award from the American Political Science Association for the Best Book in the Field of Middle East and North Africa Politics by a Senior Scholar in 2022. He is presently working on a manuscript on the politics of protest with a focus on the causes and consequences of Sudan’s 2018 popular uprising for the prospects for democratization in the country. In addition, he has published on the roots of youth militant recruitment, the debate over terrorist finance, and civil conflict in the Horn of Africa with a special focus on the armed conflicts in Sudan and Somalia. His work has appeared in Political Science and Politics (PS), the Journal of Democracy, the Journal of North African Studies, Current History, Middle East Report, Review of African Political Economy, Arab Studies Quarterly, and the UCLA Journal of Islamic Law. Dr. Medani is a previous recipient of a Carnegie Scholar on Islam award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and, more recently, he was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship from the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in 2020-2021
Dr. Medani has also worked as a researcher at the Brookings Institution, at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and with a variety of international organizations including the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the UN Office of the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs. He has also served as a senior consultant for a variety of governments on issues such as the roots of Islamic militancy, the Darfur crisis, youth politics in Sudan, and electoral reforms in Morocco including the governments of the United States, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Norway.
Book commendation from the American Political Science Association’s Middle East and North Africa Politics Section for Black Markets and Militants:
Khalid Mustafa Medani …. has written a highly original account that explains how economic globalization – particularly, labor remittances originating in the Gulf states – impacted social, religious, and political communities in Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia. Despite robust scholarly literatures focused on migration, Islamist militant groups, informal networks, and political economy, Medani has written a breakthrough account linking these diverse subjects in a single coherent narrative. Medani argues that boom and bust cycles of capital inflows interacted with underlying levels of state capacity and local political cultures to construct divergent social and political outcomes. An instant classic, Medani’s expert case knowledge and facility with bridging diverse scholarly literatures makes Black Markets and Militants an exemplar for the field of comparative politics.
