Dana El Kurd is Associate Professor at the University of Richmond, USA, and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, USA. She is author of Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine (2020). El Kurd is an expert on Arab and Palestinian politics, and regularly writes for outlets such as The Guardian, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and more, as well as appears on media such as the BBC, Aljazeera, and others.