Paul Amar serves as a Professor in the Global Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and as director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. He is a political scientist and anthropologist with affiliate appointments in the Departments of Feminist Studies, Political Science, Sociology, Comparative Literature, and the Programs in Middle East Studies, and Latin American and Iberian Studies. A three-time Fulbright Fellowship winner who speaks six languages, Professor Amar served as founding director of the PhD program and subsequently as department chair in Global Studies at UCSB where he served as cofounder of the Area Global Institute (AGI) and of the Center for Feminist Futures. He also co-founded the Center for Middle East Studies at the Fluminense Federal University in Rio de Janeiro and the first Center for Global Studies in Brazil, at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Before he began his academic career, he worked as a journalist in Cairo, a police reformer and sexuality rights activist in Rio de Janeiro, and a conflict-resolution and economic development specialist at
the United Nations. His books include Cairo Cosmopolitan (with Diane Singerman, AU Cairo Press, 2006); New Racial Missions of Policing: International Perspectives on Evolving Law-Enforcement Politics (Routledge, 2010); Global South to the Rescue: Humanitarian Superpowers and Global Rescue Industries (Routledge, 2011); Dispatches from the Arab Spring: Understanding the New Middle East (with Vijay Prashad, Minnesota UP 2013); The Middle East and Brazil: Perspectives on the New Global South (Indiana UP, 2014); The Tropical Silk Road: The Future of China in South America (with Rofel, Viteri, Fernandez and Brancoli, Stanford UP, 2022); Cairo Securitized: Reconceiving Urban Justice and Social Resilience (AU Cairo Press, 2024); and Rio as Method: Collective Resistance for a New Generation (Duke UP, 2024). His book The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism (Duke UP, 2013) was awarded the Charles Taylor Award for Best Book of the Year in 2014 by the Interpretive Methods Section of the American Political Science Association. In 2019, he was awarded Mentor of the Year by the Latin American Studies Program at UCSB.