Hugh Lovatt

Hugh Lovatt is a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations, based in London. He leads ECFR’s work on the Israeli-Palestinian and Western Sahara conflicts, and advises European policymakers on Middle Eastern policy. He is chairman of the Brussels-based European Middle East Project (EuMEP).

Lovatt is a regular commentator for leading news outlets such as The New York Times, the BBC, The Telegraph, Le Monde, and El País. His writing has been published extensively, including in The Times, Foreign Policy, Politico, The Spectator, La Stampa, Haaretz, Política Exterior, Gazeta Wyborcza, and Al-Quds al-Arabi.

He curates a widely referenced ECFR project, mapping Palestinian politics, and co-led a 2016 track-II initiative to draft an updated set of final status parameters to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He also pioneered the concept of EU Differentiation which was enshrined in UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016). His Differentiation Tracker, assessing the extent to which European states exclude Israeli settlements from their bilateral agreements with Israel, was nominated as one of the top policy studies in the University of Pennsylvania’s 2019 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report.

Lovatt has guest lectured on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Trinity College Dublin and acted as a court-appointed expert in counter-terrorism cases related to Middle Eastern armed groups and Islamic ideologies. He has appeared before several parliamentary committees, including a joint hearing of the European Parliament’s human rights and trade committees on the question of trade with non-self-governing and occupied territories in 2022.

He previously worked as a researcher for International Crisis Group, and for the European Parliament as a Schuman Fellow focusing on Lebanon and Syria. He was also an Arabic translator for the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations. His translations have been published in two books: Interpretations of Law and Ethics in Muslim Contexts in 2012, and Cities as Built and Lived Environments: Scholarship from Muslim Contexts, 1875 to 2011 in 2014.

Lovatt studied Arabic at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter and at the Institut Français du Proche-Orient in Damascus. He holds an MA in Near and Middle Eastern studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, with a major in anthropology.