Craig Charney
Senior Adviser

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Information: Craig Charney, Senior Adviser to the International Peace Institute, is a pollster and political scientist and an expert on public opinion in the Middle East and Muslim Asia, conflict resolution, and fragile states. As President of Charney Research, an international polling and market research firm in New York, he has polled in over 30 countries, including surveys for IPI in Lebanon and the West Bank and Gaza. He has also done surveys in Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, East Timor, Liberia, and many other lands.  “If there is an expert on polling in countries in the midst of turmoil, it is the principal of Charney Research, Craig Charney,” the New York Post has written.

Besides IPI, Dr. Charney’s clients have included UNDP, USAID, the World Bank, the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Democratic Institute, the International Foundation on Election Systems, Chemonics International, and other blue chips of the development and democracy promotion worlds. He has also worked for international corporations and political candidates at every level.  

Before creating his firm in 1997, he was a central figure on the polling team of Nelson Mandela in South Africa’s first election in 1994 and for President Clinton’s re-election campaign in 1996.  

Dr. Charney earned a Yale PhD in comparative politics in 2000, a Sorbonne diploma in sociology of development in 1986, and an M.Phil in politics from Oxford in 1979. He received his BA from Brandeis University in 1977.

He was appointed to the USAID Public Advisory Outreach committee in 2007. He also belongs to the American Association for Public Opinion Research and the American Association of Political Consultants.  

Dr. Charney’s publications include A New Beginning: Strategies for a More Fruitful Dialogue with the Muslim World (Council on Foreign Relations, 2005), Democracy in Indonesia 2003 (Asia Foundation, Jakarta), Democracy in Cambodia (Asia Foundation, Phnom Penh: 2002), and Indonesia Outlook Survey: Politics, Business, and Society Ten Years After the Crisis (Castle Asia, Jakarta: 2007). He also has published widely in scholarly journals as well as the press, including the New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, Weekly Standard, and Daily Star (Beirut). He is a frequent commentator for newspapers, radio, and TV in the US and Canada.