Mustapha Tlili

Sorbonne–educated and New York University (NYU) research scholar, Mustapha Tlili is the founder and director of the NYU Center for Dialogues, a senior fellow at NYU’s Remarque Institute, and Senior Advisor to the High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations of the United Nations.

Professor Tlili has also served as Special Adviser to the President of the 66th Session of the United Nations General Assembly; as a member, alongside Madeline Albright, Richard Armitage, Dennis Ross, and 18 other members, of the Leadership Group on U.S. – Muslim Engagement, which produced the report “Changing Course: A New Direction for U.S. Relations with the Muslim World, that guided the first-term Obama administration’s policies towards the Muslim world; and as Advisor to the High Level Group that drafted the report leading to the establishment of the Alliance of Civilizations. Previously, Prof.

Tlili taught at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and was a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute of New School University. He is a former senior UN secretariat official, having served as director for communications policy in the United Nations Department of Public Information, director of the UN information center for France, located in Paris, and chief of the Namibia, Anti–Apartheid, Palestine and decolonization programs in the same department. Mustapha Tlili wrote on Machiavelli's theory of government and, with Jacques Derrida, co–edited a book of essays in honor of Nelson Mandela.

An established novelist, Tlili has published five novels at Éditions Gallimard, some translated into Arabic, Chinese, English, Russian, Spanish and other languages. His oeuvre has been the subject of many PhD dissertations and other academic books in various languages. He is a winner of the Comar d’Or, Tunisia’s highest literary award, a knight of the French Order of Arts and Letters, and a member of the Tunisian Academy of Sciences, Letters and the Arts: Beït Al-Hikma. He is also a member of Human Rights Watch’s Advisory Committee for the Middle East and North Africa.