Zaid Al-Ali is an independent scholar and a lawyer.  He specializes in constitutional negotiations, peace negotiations and commercial arbitration.  His primary field of academic interest is comparative constitutional law and constitutional negotiations in Arab-majority countries (also known as the Middle East). His legal practice tends to focus on disputes in the energy sector.

Zaid’s parents are both from Iraq, he was born in Spain, grew up in New York and London where he was enrolled in French schools, went to law school at King’s College London, the University of Paris 1 (Pantheon Sorbonne) and Harvard Law School, and then practiced law in Paris, London and New York, where he worked on major energy and construction disputes, all before the age of 27.  In 2005, he moved to the Middle East to work for the United Nations, to try to help Iraq negotiate and implement its first permanent constitution in half a century.  Zaid wrote about that experience in a book entitled ‘The Struggle for Iraq’s Future’, which was published by Yale University Press in 2014.

In 2011, after realizing that that experience did not work out as well as he hoped, he moved to Cairo to try to help Egypt’s own constitutional process that was kicked off by the Arab Spring.  From there, Zaid travelled regularly to Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, Sudan and elsewhere to support virtually all of the constitutional negotiations that took place in the region.  Zaid carried out all that work while employed by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), an intergovernmental organization specializing in democracy.  Zaid also wrote about that experience in his second book, which is called ‘Arab Constitutionalism: The Coming Revolution’, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.  When many of the constitutional processes that he supported evolved into conflicts, Zaid supported the peace negotiations that were organized in those same countries.  He provided support to UN mediators, or worked directly with the negotiating parties themselves.  Zaid hasn’t written a book about that experience yet, but he is planning to do so soon.

For most of the past twenty years, Zaid has been living in Beirut, Amman, Baghdad, Cairo and Tunis. In that time, he learned to speak a variety of Arabic dialects, and interacted daily with decision makers, policy makers, members of the legal profession, his neighbors, colleagues, friends and others.  He is widely considered to be among the leading experts on Iraq, on Arab constitutions, and on conflict dynamics in the Arab region.  He has published widely on comparative constitutional law and on Iraq.

In addition to the above, Zaid has taught at Princeton University, Sciences-Po (Paris), the University of Carthage (Tunis) and the Central European University (Budapest).  Zaid was a fellow at the Berlin Institute of Advanced Studies (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin) from 2019 to 2020.  He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, etc.