Hisham Aidi's research interests include cultural globalization and the political economy of race and social movements. He received his PhD in political science from Columbia University, and has taught at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, and at the Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Redeploying the State (Palgrave 2008) a comparative study of privatization and labor movements in Latin America and the Arab world. From 2002-2003, Aidi was a consultant for UNDP's Human Development Report. As a journalist, he has written for various outlets. From 1999-2003, he worked as a cultural reporter, covering Harlem and the Bronx, for Africana.com, The New African, ColorLines, and Socialism and Democracy. More recently, his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Al Jazeera and Salon. Since 2007, he has been a contributing editor of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Culture, Politics and Society. In 2008, Aidi was named a Carnegie Scholar. In 2010, he was a Global Fellow at the Open Society Foundation. Aidi is the author most recently of Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Youth Culture (Pantheon 2014), a study of American cultural diplomacy.