Bassma Kodmani

Bassma Kodmani was a Franco-Syrian researcher on the Arab world. She was the founder and former executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative, a network of independent Arab research and policy institutes working to promote democracy in the Arab world. She was also a co-founder and spokesperson of the Syrian National Council, the country's first opposition coalition, in 2011. She later became a member of the opposition delegation for peace negotiations and a member of the Constitutional Committee for Syria. She held a PhD from Sciences Po Paris and authored several books and articles on regional security, the Syrian conflict, Israel-Palestine, the social and political evolution of the Arab world and power relations between politics and religion. She was a senior fellow at Institut Montaigne, a visiting fellow at Collège de France, an associate researcher at CERI center of Sciences Po Paris, an adviser within the international department of the French Research Council CNRS, and the head of the program on Governance and international cooperation in the Middle East at the Ford Foundation. She was also the recipient of the 2011 Raymond Georis Prize for Innovative Philanthropy for the role of her organization the Arab Reform initiative in promoting democracy in the context of the Arab Spring. She died on 2 March 2023, at the age of 64, after a long battle with cancer.