Justin Dargin

Justin Dargin is a nonresident scholar in the Middle East Program who has extensive experience working on a multitude of issues relating to the global and Middle East/North Africa energy sectors, geopolitical affairs, climate change, emergent carbon markets, and regional industrialization.  Dargin is currently a senior Middle East-North Africa energy and climate scholar at the University of Oxford, where he pioneered the first policy prescriptions for the development of carbon markets in the Middle East as a means to reduce regional domestic energy consumption and achieve international climate pledges.

Dargin was also a Fulbright Scholar on the Middle East/North Africa and a former Kennedy School fellow at Harvard University, where he won a Harvard Business School award in recognition for his groundbreaking research on the Middle Eastern energy markets.

Dargin has led strategic energy investment projects and decarbonization policy implementation for a multitude of international and national energy companies, governments, and multilateral organizations such as Shell, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Saudi Aramco, the World Bank, and the Qatari, Saudi Arabian, Emirati, and British governments.

Previously, Dargin also worked as a legal advisor at the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), where he played a leading role in determining the legal framework of the accession proceedings for Angola to enter as a full member and in advising senior leadership about the U.S. and European energy market regulatory frameworks. Dargin was also a fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, where he developed the first major substantive work on transnational Gulf natural gas trade in the form of the Dolphin Gas Project.

He has also published over a hundred book chapters and articles, as well as authored several well-regarded books on Middle Eastern geopolitics, decarbonization, and regional energy policies. 

Dargin has also been featured extensively for his expert opinion on energy issues in such global media outlets as Al Jazeera, Time Magazine, the Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Economist. He received his PhD from the University of Oxford and his graduate law degree from Georgetown University Law Center with high distinction.