Ismaïl Alexandrani
HONORARY MEMBER
Egypt
Ismaïl Al Sayed Mohamed Omar Toufic, born 9 November 1983 in Alexandria, also known as Ismaïl Alexandrani (إسماعيل الإسكندراني), with reference to his hometown, is an associate sociopolitical researcher, investigative journalist and expert in security, military affairs and the Sinai. A human rights activist, Ismaïl has also studied Islamic movements and the state-religion relationship in Muslim societies.
He was a Visiting Arab Journalist Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center (2015), Fellow Researcher at the Paris-based Arab Reform Initiative (since 2013), and a Regan-Fascell Democracy Fellowship student (International Forum for Democracy, Washington, 2012-2013). He won the Open Eye-Hany Darweesh Award (Germany, 2014) and the Global Youth Essay on Democracy Contest (World Youth Movement for Democracy, 2009). His articles have been published in several international and regional research institutions, including Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s “Sada”, Munich University’s Center for Applied Policy Research, the Doha Institute and the Al-Jazeera Center.
Ismaïl was arrested in 2015 at Hurghada airport by the Egyptian police, returning from SabirFest and from a stay in Turkey, and was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment for “disclosure of state secrets and membership in an illegal group” in 2018. Unjustly accused of being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, he in fact paid for the research he conducted on the violence perpetrated by the Egyptian regime in the Sinai with a long detention, from which he was freed only in December 2022.