Steven L. Spiegel serves as Director of the Center for Middle East Development at UCLA. Through the innovative and informal negotiation techniques he has developed, Dr. Spiegel helps produce cutting edge ideas for promoting Middle East regional security and cooperation.

Spiegel has taught political science at UCLA since 1966 – a year before he received his PhD from Harvard. His co-authored volume, World Politics in a New Era (Oxford, 2013), is now in its sixth edition. His research on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has resulted in numerous books, articles, and papers, including The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict: Making America’s Middle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan (University of Chicago, 1985); the co-authored book, The Peace Puzzle: America’s Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace from 1989–2011 (Cornell, 2013); and Op-Eds and other contributions to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Huffington Post.

Spiegel’s work in conflict resolution and regional cooperation goes back more than two decades. For many years, he was the Middle East research director for the statewide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), a multicampus research unit of the University of California created in 1983. Based at UC San Diego, the IGCC has facilitated multilateral forums for high-level policymakers, defense ministry officials, military officers, and researchers from an array of nations across the world since its creation. CMED participated in its regional diplomacy program for a number of years.

Spiegel began experimenting with innovative and informal negotiation techniques at the IGCC, as well as in programs that he managed at the International Relations Center (now the Burkle Center) of the UCLA International Institute during the 1990s. As a result, he developed cutting-edge ideas for promoting regional security and cooperation in the region. In 1995, he received the Karpf Peace Prize from UCLA for this work. Spiegel served as deputy director of the Burkle Center from 1994 through 2005. He has been the Director of CMED since 2005.

Spiegel is at work on a book on American-Israeli relations, is the editor-in-chief of the Routledge UCLA Center for Middle East Development series on Middle East security and cooperation.