Ambassador Shirin Tahir-Kheli
"Understanding Muslim Societies"

A program of the World Affairs Councils of America with support provided by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Shirin Tahir-Kheli was named by Newsweek in 2011 as one of “150 Women who Shake the World” for helping “build bridges between the U.S. and Pakistan.”

Ambassador Shirin Tahir-Kheli was selected as a 2009 scholar by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Her work: “Diplomacy Without Negotiation: George W. Bush and Democracy Promotion in the Muslim World” is nearing completion.

Shirin Tahir-Kheli was appointed by Secretary Condoleezza Rice as her Senior Advisor for Women’s Empowerment on April 5 2006. From April 2005 to her current assignment, Tahir-Kheli served as the  Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State on United Nations Reform.

From March 2003 to April 2005, she served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations at the National Security Council.

Prior to joining the National Security Council once again in 2003, Dr. Tahir-Kheli was Research Professor of International Relations at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Foreign Policy Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC.

From 1999-June 2002, she served as founding Director, South Asia Program, FPI/SAIS.

She has served as a member of:

• the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom;
• the Distinguished Advisory Panel for Sandia National Laboratories in
• Albuquerque NM;
• the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York; 
• Advisory Board of Princeton University’s Institute for the Transregional Study of Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.
  

•   Head of the United States delegation to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva in 2001: 
• Alternate United States Representative to the United Nations for Special political Affairs (1990-93), a post that carries the rank of Ambassador.
• Member United States Presidential Commission on the Public Service during 1992-93.
• Director of Near East and South Asian Affairs (1986-89), National Security Council.
• Director of Political Military Affairs(1984-1986) at the National Security Council at the White House.
• She joined the Reagan Administration in 1982 as Member, Policy Planning Staff in the Office of the Secretary of State.

Tahir-Kheli was a member of the Board of trustees of the Aga Khan University in 1996-98, served at the US Army War College as Visiting professor in 1980-81 and was a tenured Associate Professor at Temple University.

Ambassador Tahir-Kheli will be introduced by Dr. Kelly Shannon. Dr. Kelly J. Shannon (A.B., Vassar College; M.A., University of Connecticut; Ph.D., Temple University) is an Assistant Professor of History and International Studies at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where she has taught since 2011.  Her area of specialty is the history of U.S. foreign relations, U.S.-Islamic relations, women's rights, and human rights.  Her publications include "The Right to Bodily Integrity: Women’s Rights as Human Rights and the International Movement to End Female Genital Mutilation, 1970s-1990s,” in The Human Rights Revolution: An International History, eds. Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and William I. Hitchcock. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); "Truman and the Middle East" in Blackwell Companion to Harry S. Truman, ed. Dan Margolies.  (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, October 2012); " ’Maybe I Can Marry Them Both’: Conflicted American Views on the Algerian War,” Hindsight (Spring 2007); and the forthcoming article in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs “’I’m Glad I’m Not a Saudi Woman’: The First Gulf War and U.S. Encounters with Saudi Gender Relations."  Her current book project, Veiled Intentions: Islam, Global Feminism, and U.S. Foreign Policy Since 1979,  addresses a fundamental dilemma in the history of U.S. foreign relations, one with great importance for contemporary foreign policy: How women’s rights became a primary concern of U.S. relations with the Islamic world, competing with and sometimes even displacing superpower conflict, national security, and access to oil as guiding forces of foreign policymaking towards countries such as Afghanistan.

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