Our Team
NSLS is coordinated by a small staff and supported by student researchers, faculty advisers, policy practitioners, and subject-matter experts contributing to practical legislative research for Syria's Parliament.
University Network
The NSLS University Network connects student researchers and university-based teams supporting legislative research on Syria.
This summer, more than twenty Princeton students and recent graduates are contributing to NSLS research projects across public finance, investment, agriculture, education, health, local administration, and institutional reform.
They are led by Alice McCarthy.
NSLS is developing university chapters for the academic year to expand student research capacity and connect legislative research projects with faculty and practitioner review.
Chapters are being developed at Georgetown and Harvard for Fall 2026.
Advisory Board
The NSLS Advisory Board provides strategic guidance to the organization and brings together senior scholars, practitioners, and former officials with experience in governance, law, diplomacy, and Syrian affairs.
Zaid Al-Ali is an independent scholar and practitioner specializing in constitutional negotiations and reform in the Arab world.
He is a Senior Programme Manager at International IDEA, a visiting research scholar at Princeton University, and the founder of the Arab Association of Constitutional Law. He is the author of The Struggle for Iraq's Future and Arab Constitutionalism: The Coming Revolution. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and Foreign Policy, among other publications, and he is a frequent commentator in the international media.
Cameron Hume served as U.S. Ambassador to Algeria, South Africa, and Indonesia, as well as Chargé d'Affaires in Sudan.
A career Foreign Service officer, he also held diplomatic assignments in Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Italy, and at the United Nations. He now serves as the executive director of the Maritime Humanitarian Aid Foundation.
Max Weiss is Professor of History at Princeton University, where he studies the cultural, intellectual, and literary history of the modern Middle East.
He is the author of Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba'thist Syria (Stanford UP, 2022), and In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi'ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (Harvard UP, 2010); co-editor (with Jens Hanssen) of Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda (Cambridge UP, 2016), and Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Present (Cambridge UP, 2018); and translator, most recently, of Alawiya Sobh, This Thing Called Love (Calcutta, 2022); Dunya Mikhail, The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq (New York, 2018), and Nihad Sirees, States of Passion (London, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Modern Middle East History from Stanford University.
Research Network
NSLS is building a wider research network of scholars, practitioners, lawyers, economists, policy specialists, and regional experts who can support legislative research on Syria.
Members may review draft papers, participate in briefings and consultations, connect NSLS with relevant institutions or experts, or contribute subject-matter expertise on specific policy areas.
Join the Research Network