Karen E. Young is a political economist focusing on the Gulf, the broader Middle East and North Africa region, and the intersection of energy, finance, and security. She is a senior research scholar at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy. She was a senior fellow and founding director of the Program on Economics and Energy at the Middle East Institute. She was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and has been a professorial lecturer at the George Washington University, teaching courses on the international relations of the Middle East. She regularly teaches at the U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Institute. Earlier, she was a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington and a research fellow at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She led a seminar series on emerging markets in the Middle East and North Africa at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. At the American University of Sharjah, she served as an assistant professor of political science from 2009-14. Prior to joining AUS, she held research and administration roles at New York University in New York City.  

Young’s second book, The Economic Statecraft of the Gulf Arab States: Deploying Aid, Investment and Development Across MENAP, was published at the end of 2022 with I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury. Her first book, The Political Economy of Energy, Finance and Security in the United Arab Emirates: Between the Majilis and the Market, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. She founded and wrote dozens of articles for Market Watch at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. She has published articles in the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Lawfare, Al Monitor, ORIENT, Oxford Analytica, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Conservative Middle East Council, The National and Gulf News, Journal of Arabian Studies, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Current History, Gulf Affairs, Security Dialogue, Internationale Politik, and Middle East Policy, among many academic and analytical outlets. Her comments have been featured on NPR, CBS, CBC, and AFP and in The New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Reuters, Al Arabiya, Arab News, Debtwire, MEED, and MEES. Her work has been supported by grants from the Smith Richardson Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Fulbright Program (Ecuador 1997-99; Bulgaria 2005-06), International Research and Exchange Board, American Council of Learned Societies, Woodrow Wilson Center, U.S. State Department Middle East Partnership Initiative, American Political Science Association MENA Fellows Program, and Emirates Foundation (via LSE).