As U.S. Program Director, Michael Wahid Hanna leads the organisation’s research, analysis, policy prescription and advocacy on U.S. foreign policy in conflict settings. He joined Crisis Group in May 2021.

Hanna works on issues of international security, international law, and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law. 

He has published widely on U.S. foreign policy in newspapers and journals, including articles in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, Democracy, Middle East Report, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Survival, among other publications.

Prior to joining Crisis Group, Hanna was a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. He served as a consultant for Human Rights Watch in Baghdad in 2008. Previously, Hanna was a senior fellow at the International Human Rights Law Institute. From 1999 to 2004, Hanna practiced corporate law with the New York law firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. Fluent in Arabic, he was a Fulbright Scholar at Cairo University. He received a JD from New York University School of Law, where he was an editor of the Law Review.

• Hybrid Actors: Armed Groups and State Fragmentation in the Middle East (2019)
• Citizenship and Its Discontents: The Struggle for Rights, Pluralism, and Inclusion in the Middle East (2019)
• Order from Ashes: New Foundations for Security in the Middle East (2018)
• Arab Politics Beyond the Uprisings: Experiments in an Era of Resurgent Authoritarianism (2017)

• English
• Arabic (fluent)