Dalia Ziada is an award-winning writer and political analyst specializing in governance, geopolitics, and regional security in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. Dalia studied international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, majoring in international security studies. She currently serves as the Washington D.C. Coordinator and Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP).
Over the past two decades, Dalia held senior positions at regional and international think tanks and civil society organizations, in her native Egypt, Israel, and the United States, where she led projects, advised policymakers, and authored articles, papers, and books analyzing the geopolitical conflicts and power relations in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Dalia co-founded and chaired the Liberal Democracy Institute (LDI), directed research at the Center for Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean Studies (MEEM), served as the Executive Director of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies (IKC), and was the Regional Director in the Middle East and North Africa at the Washington-based American Islamic Congress (AIC), and a Senior Research and Diplomacy Fellow at the Israel-based Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA). She also served as a board member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of Egypt’s National Council for Women (NCW).
Since May 2024, Dalia has been roaming American university campuses, in partnership with Hillel International, to lecture on the changing geopolitics of the Middle East in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks. In the academic year of 2024/2025, she visited 59 campuses across the United States.
Dalia has earned several awards for the political impact of her writing and activism. She has been globally recognized for her leading role in the Arab Spring revolutions of 2010-2011 and for her uncommon stance as an Arab Muslim intellectual against Hamas and in support of Israel following the October 7 attacks that Israel endured in 2023. Dalia has been active in the people-to-people Muslim-Jewish Dialogue and Arab-Israeli Dialogue for 16 years. She has also engaged in several political and cultural battles against political Islamists and radical Islamist groups in her country of origin, Egypt, in Arab countries, and in the United States.
Dalia authored the best-selling book “The Curious Case of the Three-Legged Wolf – Egypt: Military, Islamism, and Liberal Democracy” (2019) and other internationally acclaimed books in English and Arabic, dating back to 2006. Her next book project, “The Coalition of Odds,” explores the geopolitical and security structures of the new Middle East emerging from the regional reshuffle of power coalitions, the impact of the Great Power Competition, and the changing world order.