Zahra Babar is the Executive Director of the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar, where she has worked for seventeen years in senior research and administrative leadership roles. At CIRS, she has overseen numerous multidisciplinary research initiatives focusing on the Gulf and the braoder Middle East, facilitating collaborations among scholars, policymakers, and practitioners that have contributed to establishing CIRS as a leading platform for critical scholarship on the Middle East.

CIRS has convened major conferences, working groups, and policy dialogues on Afghanistan — most prominently the 2023 Hiwaraat conference titled “Afghanistan Regional Symposium: Confronting the Impasse,” which brought together scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to examine humanitarian and education crises, climate change, food insecurity, and governance challenges in Afghanistan.

Before joining Georgetown, Zahra spent twelve years in the international development sector, holding positions with the United Nations Development Programme and the International Labour Organisation.

She is the author and co-author of several publications, including “The Buying of Freedom: Migrant Workers and the Azad Visa in the Gulf” (International Migration, 2025); “The 2022 World Cup and Migrants’ Rights in Qatar: Racialised Labour Hierarchies and the Influence of Racial Capitalism,” with N. Vora (The Political Quarterly, 2022); “The Vagaries of the In-between: Labor Citizenship in the Persian Gulf” (IJMES, 2020); and “Purveyors of Dreams: Labour Recruiters in the Pakistan to Saudi Arabia Migration Corridor” (Migration and Development, 2020). Her most recent book is the co-edited volume Transnational Generations in the Arab Gulf States and Beyond (Springer, 2024).