Mustapha Kamel Al-Sayyid is a professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science at Cairo University. He has also taught at the American University in Cairo, as well as Harvard and Colgate universities in the United States. Al-Sayyid spent time as a visiting scholar at UCLA and a research fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has published works in English, Arabic and French on issues of civil society, democratization and politics of development in the Middle East.