Professor Abdullah Baabood is the Chair of the State of Qatar for Islamic Area Studies at Waseda University, Japan and a Non-Resident scholar at Carnegie Middle East Centre. He has previously held the positions of the Director of the Gulf Studies Center at Qatar University and the Director of the Gulf Research Center at the University of Cambridge, UK. He was also a visiting professor at the Middle Institute, National University of Singapore and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar. His teaching and research interest focuses on the international political economy of the Gulf.