Michael Wahid Hanna is director of the U.S. program at International Crisis Group. He was a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and co-director of TCF’s foreign policy program until 2021. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law. His work focuses on issues of international security, international law, and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia. Hanna is the co-editor of Hybrid Actors: Armed Groups and State Fragmentation in the Middle East (2019), Citizenship and Its Discontents: The Struggle for Rights, Inclusion and Pluralism in the Middle East (2019), Order from Ashes: New Foundations for Security in the Middle East (2018), and Arab Politics Beyond the Uprisings: Experiments in an Era of Resurgent Authoritarianism (2017).
He has published widely on U.S. foreign policy in newspapers and journals, including articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, Democracy, Middle East Report, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Survival, among other publications. He appears regularly on PBS, BBC, and NPR, including appearances on Charlie Rose and the PBS NewsHour.
Hanna directed The Century Foundation’s 2015 International Working Group on Pakistan, chaired by Ambassador Thomas Pickering, and served as a co-director of The Century Foundation’s 2011 International Task Force on Afghanistan, co-chaired by Ambassador Pickering and Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi.
He served as a consultant for Human Rights Watch in Baghdad in 2008. Prior to joining The Century Foundation, Hanna was a senior fellow at the International Human Rights Law Institute. From 1999 to 2004, Hanna practiced corporate law with the New York law firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. Fluent in Arabic, he was a Fulbright Scholar at Cairo University. He received a JD from New York University School of Law, where he was an editor of the Law Review. Hanna is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
