Frederic Wehrey

Frederic Wehrey is a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where his research focuses on governance, conflict, and security in Libya, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf.

His articles, essays, and reporting have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic, The New Yorker, TIME, Politico, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Small Wars and Insurgencies, the Journal of North African Studies, Mediterranean Politics, the Chicago Journal of International Law, and the Journal of Democracy. He has been interviewed by major media outlets such as NPR, ABC News, CNN, PBS NewsHour, and the BBC. He has served as a consultant to the United Nations and has testified before the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.

He is the author of The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018), which the New York Times called “the essential text on the country’s disintegration.” His previous book, Sectarian Politics in the Gulf: From the Iraq War to the Arab Uprisings (Columbia University Press, 2013), was named a “Best Book on the Middle East” by Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy magazines in 2014 and 2013, respectively. He is currently writing a book on African and Middle Eastern resistance to European imperialism during the interwar period, under contract with Liveright/W.W. Norton.

Before joining Carnegie, Wehrey was a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. He served for two decades as an officer in the U.S. Air Force, with tours across the Middle East and North and East Africa.

He holds a doctorate in International Relations from Oxford University and a Master’s in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University.