Charles Lister

Charles Lister is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, where he focuses on terrorism, insurgency and sub-state security threats across the Middle East. He is also a senior consultant to The Shaikh Groups Syria Track II Dialogue Initiative, within which he has helped coordinate a two-and-a-half year process of engagement with the leaderships of over 100 Syrian armed opposition groups. He was formerly a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar and before that, the head of MENA at the London-based IHS Janes Terrorism and Insurgency Centre.Lister's critically-acclaimed book, The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016.