page_title: Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou
section_title: Academic and diplomatic career
hierarchical_section_title: Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou / Academic and diplomatic career
caption_attribution_description: English: Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou public talk at Harvard University circa 1997
context_page_description: Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou is a political historian. A Harvard University academic, Mohamedou is Professor of International History at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. He is a member of the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, and is regarded as a leading international expert on the new forms of transnational terrorism. Mohamedou is also a Visiting Professor at Sciences Po Paris in the Doctoral School. Previously, he was the Deputy Director and Academic Dean of the Geneva Center for Security Policy. He served as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of Mauritania from 2008 until 2009.
context_section_description: Mohamedou was born in Atar, Mauritania on April 3, 1968. He grew up in Paris, Madrid, and New York where his father was Ambassador at the United Nations. In Spain, he studied at the Lycée Français de Madrid where he obtained his Baccalaureate in Economic and Social Sciences in 1986. In France, he received a Diplome d'Etudes Universitaires Generales (DEUG) in International Law at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University Paris I in 1988. In the United States, he earned a Bachelor in International Relations at Hunter College in New York in 1991. He then obtained a Master's in International Relations in 1993 and a Ph.D. in Political Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1996. There he studied with Arthur Schlesinger, Dankwart Rustow, Ralph Miliband, Irving Leonard Markowitz, Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner, Stanley Renshon, Kenneth Sherrill, and Kenneth Erickson. Supervised by Howard Lentner, his doctoral dissertation was on "State-Building and Regime Security: A Study of Iraq's Decision-Making Process during the 1991 Second Gulf War". In 1997, he was a Post-doctoral Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University working with Roger Owen, and in 1998 was appointed Research Associate at the Ralph Bunche Institute on the United Nations in New York, then directed by Benjamin Rivlin.
  Mohamedou was Director of Research at the International Council on Human Rights Policy, located in Geneva, from 1998 to 2004, where he oversaw research on national human rights institutions,, and media coverage of human rights,. He co-authored two reports on the persistence and mutation of racism and on racial and economic exclusion, which were presented at the World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa in September 2001.
  From 2004 to 2008, Mohamedou was Associate Director of the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research at Harvard University where he founded the Transnational and Non-State Armed Groups Project.
  He was appointed as Ambassador and Director of Multilateral Cooperation at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation in Mauritania in 2008, and subsequently Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation. He went back to academia in 2009.
  Mohamedou teaches in the International History Department at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva since 2010,, and has been chair of that department since 2017. He was Deputy Director and Academic Dean of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy from 2014 to 2017. He is a lecturer at the Doctoral School at Sciences Po Paris since 2013 and teaches summer schools at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Mohamedou was Visiting Professor at the University of Milan in 2014-2017. He sits on the Scientific Committee of the Middle East Programme of the European University Institute and on the editorial board of the journal Relations Internationales.
  Since 2014, he is a Commissioner in the West Africa Commission on Drugs (WACD) appointed by former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, and, since 2017, a member of the High Level Panel on Migration set up by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the African Union.
caption: Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou in 1997, Harvard University
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