Leila Farsakh
Leila Farsakh () (born 1967) is a Palestinian political economist who was born in Jordan and is an Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts Boston. Her area of expertise is Middle East Politics, Comparative Politics, and the Politics of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Farsakh holds a MPhil from the University of Cambridge, UK (1990) and a PhD from the University of London (2003). Farsakh conducted post-doctoral research at Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and is also a research affiliate at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has  worked with a number of organizations, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris (1993 - 1996) and the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute in Ramallah (1998 - 1999). In 2001, she won the Peace and Justice Award from the Cambridge Peace Commission in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Farsakh is the Project Co-Director for Jerusalem 2050, a problem-solving project jointly sponsored by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Center for International Studies. She has written extensively on issues related to the Palestinian economy and the Oslo peace process, international migration and regional  integration. Farsakh was also a member of the Board at the non-governmental organization RESIST (www.resistinc.org), founded in 1967 to provide grant money and support to grassroots movements advocating for social change.