Biography
Dr. Louis Blin has been working as a Diplomat at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 1995. He has been posted in Algeria, Syria, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco. Blin is now based in Florence, Italy, where he heads the Middle East Directions Research Programme at the Robert Shuman Centre. He also is Senior Associate Fellow at the Riyad based King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies since January, 2021.
Before joining the Diplomatic Corp, he served as a Researcher at the Centre d’études et de documentation économique, juridique et sociale (CEDEJ, Cairo), a unit of the French National Center for Scientific Research, and previously as the editor of Arab Oil & Gas Magazine in Paris.
An Arabist, he is the author of many books on the MENA region, including The World Muslim League, a Muslim Revival?; Saudi Arabia, from Black Gold to the Red Sea; Alexandre Dumas’ Arabian Travelogues; Jeddah, The City of Eve; The French Discovery of Arabia; The Arab World in the Albums of Tintin; Alexandria and the Mediterranean, between History and Memory; The Economics of Peace in the Middle East; The Economics of Liberalization in Egypt; The Gulf Oil, Peace and War in the Middle East; Algerian contemporary Political Elites; and Algeria, from the Sahara to the Sahel.