Dr Rim Turkmani is a Senior Research Fellow at the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she directs the Syria conflict research programme.
Her policy-oriented research work focuses on identity politics, legitimate governance, transforming Syria’s war economy into a peaceful one and the relationship between local and external drivers of the conflict.
Dr Turkmani is a member of the Women’s Advisory Board to the UN Special Envoy to Syria and sits on the advisory board of airwars.org, which monitor the international coalition strikes against ISIS. She directed a project entitled Crowd-Sourcing Conflict and Peace Events in the Syrian Conflict, which produced a detailed database of violence and peace-making instances.
An astrophysicist by training, Dr Turkmani was previously a Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow of the Royal Society and writer-curator on the history of Islamic science and culture, focusing on the impact of the Arabic/Islamic science on the scientific revolution in the 17th century. She curated two international exhibitions on the subject and also appears regularly in Arabic and English media commenting on Syria.