Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar is a nonresident scholar in the Middle East Program at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an associate professor of international affairs at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service. He is also a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and a nonresident fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research focuses on Middle East politics and international security.

Mohammad is the author of Religious Statecraft: The Politics of Islam in Iran (Columbia University Press, 2018). He is currently working on several research projects on Iran’s regional policy, elite politics, and nuclear strategy. Over the past two decades, his commentary and analysis have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and other major outlets. His academic work on the role of domestic politics and ideology in foreign policy and political violence have been published in Security Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Journal of Global Security Studies, and Perspectives on Politics, among others.

Mohammad received his PhD from the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He also holds a bachelor of arts in social sciences from the University of Tehran and a master of arts in international relations from the University of Chicago.