Mustapha Kamel Al-Sayyid was educated in Egypt and Switzerland. He got his Ph.D. from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland in 1979.
He has been teaching Political Science at Cairo University and the American University since 1982.
He spent one year as a visiting scholar at the University of California Los Angeles and one semester at the Law School of Harvard University.
He spent the fall semester of 2005 teaching two Political Science courses at Colgate University in the US.
He held leading positions in both the Egyptian Human Rights Organization and the Arab Political Science Association.
He served as a member of the Committee on Global Security and Cooperation of the US Social Science Research Council.
He spent two months in the summer of 2002 working as a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in New York.
He has several publications in Arabic, English and French.
He works mostly on questions of Political Economy, Human Rights, and civil society.
His writings were published in World Policy, Middle East Journal, Arab Studies Quarterly, Maghreb-Mashreq and Cairo Papers in Social Science. He directed the Center for the Study of Developing Countries at Cairo University from April 1995 until November 2004.
At present he is also the executive director of Partners –in-Development for Research, Consulting and Training, a think tank devoted to issues of development and the Lead Author of the Arab Human Development Report 2008 – UNDP.
