Karen E. Young is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute (MEI), where she leads the Economics and Energy Initiative. She is also a senior research scholar at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy. A political economist, her work focuses on the Gulf and broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, with particular attention to the intersection of energy, finance, and security.
Dr. Young has held senior research and teaching positions at a number of academic and policy institutions. She was previously a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. She has taught courses on Middle East international relations at George Washington University and regularly teaches at the US Department of State Foreign Service Institute. Her academic appointments also include serving as a research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science Middle East Centre and leading a seminar on emerging markets in MENA at Johns Hopkins SAIS. From 2009-2014, she was an assistant professor of political science at the American University of Sharjah.
Dr. Young is the author of The Economic Statecraft of the Gulf Arab States: Deploying Aid, Investment and Development Across MENAP (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2023) and The Political Economy of Energy, Finance and Security in the United Arab Emirates: Between the Majilis and the Market (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Her analysis has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Lawfare, The National, Journal of Arabian Studies, and Security Dialogue, among many others. Her commentary has been featured in NPR, CBS, AFP, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Reuters.
Her research has been supported by grants from the Smith Richardson Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Fulbright Program (Ecuador 1997-99; Bulgaria 2005-06), the International Research and Exchange Board (IREX), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the US State Department Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), among others.
She holds a PhD in Political Science from the City University of New York Graduate Center, an MA in Political Science from Columbia University, an MA in International Economics from Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Quito, and a BA in Anthropology from Wellesley College.
