Mahmoud Jaraba is a researcher and lecturer at Erlangen Center for Islam and Law in Europe (EZIRE) and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Germany. Jaraba is also the author of the monograph Hamas, Tentative March toward Peace (Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 2010) and numerous other publications that have appeared in scholarly journals and popular media, including Foreign Policy and the Al Jazeera Center for Studies. He has conducted extensive research in Palestine and has worked in a number of Palestinian NGOs, among them the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research; Muwatin: The Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy; and AMAN: The Coalition for Accountability and Integrity. He holds a PhD from the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, with a dissertation on the ideological transformations of the Turkish Justice and Development Party and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in comparative perspective. He also holds an MA in International Studies and a BA in Political Science from Birzeit University, Palestine.