Ilyas Saliba

Ilyas is a postdoctoral researcher at the chair for international politics and conflict studies at the University of Erfurt, an adjunct lecturer at the Hertie School and an associate fellow at the Center of Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO).

Ilyas previously worked with Amnesty International in Berlin as MENA advocacy officer, as well as with the Center for Security Studies (CSS) in Zürich, the German Institute for Foreign and Security Policy (SWP), and the WZB Berlin Social Center. He gained parliamentary experience working as a foreign policy advisor to an MP in the Bundestag in 2022. He is an election observer for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), as well as a member of the European Coordinating Committee for Academic Freedom Advocacy and the academic freedom committees of the British and the German Middle Eastern Studies Associations.

Ilyas has been a guest on ARD, ZDF and Deutsche Welle, and German Public Radio, among others. His commentary has been published in Open Democracy, Der SPIEGEL, Qantara, Haaretz, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die ZEIT, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, and Tagesspiegel. In 2022 Ilyas co-authored the book: University Autonomy Decline. Causes, Responses, and Implications for Academic Freedom. In 2020, Ilyas contributed two chapters to the book​Researching Academic Freedom and co-authored ​Safer Field Research in the Social Sciences. Previously, he co-authored the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development’s annual country report on Morocco. 

Ilyas holds a PhD from the Humboldt University Berlin. In 2024, his dissertation was awarded the prize for best dissertation in Middle Eastern Studies by the German Association for Middle Eastern Studies (DAVO). In the course of his research, he has conducted extensive fieldwork in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia and has been a research fellow at the WZB’s research unit on democracy and democratization, as well as a visiting researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Oxford University, the American University in Cairo and the Ecole de Gouvernance et d’Economie in Rabat. Ilyas studied political science and international relations at the University of Hamburg, the University of Gothenburg, ETH Zürich and the Free University of Berlin. His studies were supported by scholarships from the Bucerius Zeit Foundation, the German National Academic Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).