THE INSTITUTE FOR 21ST CENTURY QUESTIONS
Hussain Al-Shahristani
President of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs
Dr. Hussain Al-Shahristani is the President of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. He served as Deputy Prime Minister for Energy Affairs in Iraq from 2010-2014, and served also as Minister of Oil and Minister of Higher Education. A graduate of Imperial College in London and University of Toronto, he started his professional career as a nuclear scientist at the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission in 1970. Dr. Al-Shahristani was sent to prison when he refused to work on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons programme. He spent ten years in solitary confinement at Abu-Ghraib prison, managing to escape during the first Gulf war and fleeing to Iran and then the UK as a refugee. After the fall of Saddam in 2003, he returned to Iraq to participate in the reconstruction of the country. He was awarded the “Freedom from Fear 2012”, one of the Four Freedoms Award by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.
21CQ People
- Ramesh ThakurProfessor in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University
- Michael MorganAssistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina
- Robert AsselinAssociate Director of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa
- Alexander SerguninProfessor, St. Petersburg State University, Russia
- Nabil FahmyFormer Minister of Foreign Affairs of Egypt
- Douglas SandersonAssociate Professor of Law at the University of Toronto
- Michael ByersCanada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia
- Yoram SchweitzerSenior Research Fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel-Aviv
- David BietteDirector of the Polar Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC
- Bob RaeFormer Premier of Ontario & Federal Liberal Leader VIEW ALL