Paul Amar is the Director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies and Professor at the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

He is a political scientist and anthropologist who speaks seven languages and has published in nine languages. He holds affiliate appointments in Feminist Studies, Sociology, Comparative Literature, Middle East Studies, and Latin American & Iberian Studies, and has been awarded two Fulbright Fellowships in the past. 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 as a conflict-resolution and economic-development specialist at the United Nations. 

His books include: Cairo Cosmopolitan (2006); New Racial Missions of Policing (2010); Global South to the Rescue (2011); Dispatches from the Arab Spring (2013); and The Middle East and Brazil (2014). His book “The Security Archipelago” was awarded the Charles Taylor Award for “Best Book of the Year” in 2014 by the American Political Science Association.