Dr. Mogielnicki is a Middle East-focused political economist. His current professional affiliations span top-tier research institutes, academic institutions, NGOs, and consultancies. Dr. Mogielnicki is a Senior Resident Scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute as well as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Georgetown University and the George Washington University. He serves as an Advisor with Freedom House and an External Consultant with Eurasia Group. Dr. Mogielnicki is the author of A Political Economy of Free Zones in Gulf Arab States (Palgrave Macmillan 2021), and he is currently working on an edited volume about the political economy of sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. He is a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Board of Advisors at Henley & Partners. The Middle East Policy Council listed Dr. Mogielnicki in their inaugural 40 Under 40 awards for influential Middle East experts. Dr. Mogielnicki holds a D.Phil degree from the University of Oxford’s Magdalen College and a M.Phil degree in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford’s St Antony’s College. He received his BA from Georgetown University with a double major in Arabic and Government, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.
Dr. Mogielnicki manages his institute’s political economy research portfolio. He specializes in the political and economic trajectories of Gulf Arab states, special economic zone dynamics, sovereign wealth funds, China-MENA relations, and regional technology trends. Dr. Mogielnicki created and leads the Next Gen Gulf series examining technology trends in Gulf Arab states and Looking East: The China-Gulf Initiative. He is particularly interested in how the geostrategic states in the Gulf and broader Middle East engage in processes of economic transformation through trade and investment policies, labor market interventions, economic diversification, and technological innovation.
Dr. Mogielnicki is currently the editor of a contributed volume for Palgrave Macmillan on the political economy of Middle Eastern and Asian sovereign wealth funds. He published his monograph, A Political Economy of Free Zones in Gulf Arab States, with Palgrave Macmillan’s international political economy series in April 2021. He recently authored a chapter in Artificial Intelligence in the Gulf: Challenges and Opportunities, which was published in August 2021. He also wrote a chapter on China’s technology-related commercial engagement with the Middle East region for the Routledge Handbook on China - Middle East Relations (December 2021). In addition to many other academic and think tank publications, his work has appeared in Foreign Policy, Axios, The Banker, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, and World Politics Review.