Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - MERGE - Migration and the Middle East

Advisory-Board

 

Dr. Aisha-Nusrat Ahmad

studied sociology, political science, European ethnology and cultural anthropology at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and the Goethe University in Frankfurt and holds a PhD in sociology from the Goethe University. She has held research and/or teaching positions at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, the University of Applied Sciences in Frankfurt, the University of Vienna and the International Psychoanalytic University in Berlin. Her intersectional work and research focuses on gender, racism, sexuality and migration, as well as the experience and dealing with violence in conflict and war zones at the individual, institutional and societal levels in Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. Most recently, she was the Diversity and Equality Officer for the Berlin University Alliance.

 

 

Prof. Dr. Gökce Yurdakul (Co-founder)

is Georg Simmel Professor of Diversity and Social Conflict at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Previously, she was the Director of the Department of Social Sciences (2019-21), and the Director of the Berlin Institute of Migration and Integration Research (BIM, 2022-24). Her areas of interest are gender, immigration, citizenship and qualitative methods. Her research has been funded by national and international grants. She was a visiting scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at the Harvard University (US) University of South Pacific  (Fiji) and University of Sussex (the UK). She wrote and edited five books as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She is currently coediting The Oxford Handbook on Intersectional Approaches to Migration, Gender and Sexuality with her colleagues, Jean Beaman, Liza Mügge, Sarah Scuzzarello and Sirijit Sunanta.

 

Prof. Dr. Naika Foroutan 

is Professor of Social Sciences at the Humboldt-University in Berlin. She specializes in integration and migration research with a particular focus on countries of immigration, their shifting identities as well as their prevalent attitudes towards minorities. She has been appointed Director of the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research (BIM) – a research institute based at Humboldt University aimed at providing empirical analysis for migration and integration debates in Europe. Naika Foroutan also serves as an adviser and consultant to German political parties and other national and international institutions.

 

 

 

Dr. Nader Talebi (Co-founder)

is a Berlin-based researcher at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He studied software engineering and sociology and finished his PhD at Lancaster University on state power and revolution in Iran. As a researcher at the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research (BIM) and before at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim, he is interested in studying states, social movements, nationalism and migration in the Middle East. He is currently working on refugees and migrants in the countries of origin, transit, and destination along the migration routes from the ME to Europe. In particular, he explores regimes of mobility and their relations with narratives of migration and citizenship in the ME.

 

Ambassador Yama Yari (Co-founder)

Afghanistan's Ambassador to Germany (2020-2024), has been a transformative leader in Afghan public sector reform. As Minister of Transport and Public Works, he initiated the nation’s largest administrative restructuring, unifying five agencies under a single transport ministry to enhance efficiency and accountability. He also founded the National Procurement Authority, achieving $200M in public savings and fostering transparency. Named Afghanistan’s Anti-Corruption Champion in 2018, Mr. Yari's work emphasizes governance, civic engagement, and institutional reform. He holds an MSc in Engineering & Business Management from Imperial College London and a BEng from the University of Brighton.