Michael Scott Doran

Michael Scott Doran
Michael Doran (born April 25, 1962) is an American analyst of the international politics of the Middle East. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He was previously a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He has been a visiting professor at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and taught at the University of Central Florida. He was appointed to the National Security Council and was also deputy assistant secretary for public diplomacy at the U.S. Department of Defense under the George W. Bush administration. Doran supported the invasion of Iraq.
Education
Doran received his PhD in Near Eastern studies from Princeton University in 1997. His PhD advisor was L. Carl Brown. He attended Stanford University, graduating with a BA in history in 1984.
Academic career
Doran is senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, which he joined in 2014. Before that, he was a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Politics at the Brookings Institution. Previously, he was a visiting professor, at New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School for Public Service. Before returning to academia, he was appointed deputy assistant secretary for public diplomacy at the U.S. Department of Defense in April 2007 after being the senior director for Near East and North African affairs at the National Security Council from 2005 to 2007. His teaching career began at the University of Central Florida and he later joined the Near East Studies Department at Princeton University as assistant professor until he was appointed to the George W. Bush administration.
Advocacy of Azerbaijan
Doran has been criticized in The American Conservative as "one of the leading hawkish cheerleaders for Azerbaijan" and encouraging anti-Armenian sentiment. Iranian-American journalist Sohrab Ahmari has called Doran a "propagandist…cheering—an ongoing, current ethnic cleansing." Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute described him as "carrying water for the Azerbaijani regime."
During the 2023 flight of Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians, which has been described by international experts including the International Association of Genocide Scholars as a war crime or crime against humanity being perpetrated by Azerbaijan, Doran described the sudden departure of over 80 percent of the ethnic Armenian population of the region as a "voluntary exodus of Armenians."
Casey Michel, head of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation, has criticized Doran's assertion that Azerbaijan under dictator Ilham Aliyev has become a "bastion of diversity and tolerance", writing that that it was true "in the same way that, say, Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile, and Mobutu's Zaire were also 'bastions of diversity and tolerance.'"
Books
Pan-Arabism Before Nasser: Egyptian Power Politics and the Palestine Question. 1999. Oxford University Press. .
"What Carter Owes Begin". In Menachem Begin's Zionist Legacy. 2015. Koren Publishers. .
Ike's Gamble: America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East. 2016. Free Press. .
References
External links
Profile in foreignaffairs.com
Washington Post biography
Middle Eastern studies scholars
George W. Bush administration personnel
1962 births
Living people
American political scientists
New York University faculty
Princeton University faculty
Princeton University alumni
Stanford University alumni
Harvard University faculty
United States National Security Council staffers
Hudson Institute