Helena Cobban (born 1952) is a British-American writer and researcher on international relations, with special interests in the Middle East, the international system, and transitional justice. She is a non-resident Senior fellow at the Washington DC-based Center for International Policy. She is the founder and CEO of the book-publishing company, Just World Books and the Executive President of the small educational non-profit organization, Just World Educational. Having contributed throughout her career to numerous media outlets and authored seven books, she resumed her writing career in 2019.
Life
Born in Abingdon, England in 1952 to James Cobban and Lorna Mary Cobban, she was educated at Queen Anne's School, Caversham and St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she received her BA (Hons) in Philosophy and Economics in 1973. She was awarded an MA from Oxford in 1981.
From 1974 through 1981, she worked as a Beirut-based correspondent for news outlets including The Christian Science Monitor, Christopher Mayhew’s Middle East International, The Sunday Times, ABC News, and the BBC.
In 1982, she moved to the United States to take-up a research fellowship at the Harvard University Center for International Affairs, where she wrote her first book, The Palestinian Liberation Organisation. It was published in English in 1984, was translated into Arabic and several other languages, and remains in print.
Since then, she has published six additional books: three others on questions of Middle East war and peace, and three on other international issues. Her seventh book, Re-engage! American and the World After Bush was published in 2008. Rep. Lee H. Hamilton, Co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, described it as, "An impassioned, thought-provoking, and accessible brief from a highly esteemed journalist on how all of us, as individuals, can act to help better our country and world." She has also contributed chapters to around 20 scholarly books edited by others.
From 1991 to 1993, she was Co-Director of the Middle East project at Search for Common Ground, in Washington, DC.
From 1990 through 2007, Cobban contributed a regular column on global issues to The Christian Science Monitor, and from 1993 through 2006 she contributed a separate column to the Arabic-language international daily Al-Hayat.
In February 2003, she started publishing "Just World News", a blog on global issues that has gained a broad international readership and has been cited in Le Monde diplomatique and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Boston Review, where she has published essays on Palestinian-Israeli issues, Iraq, and post-conflict justice questions. In the late 2000s she briefly contributed a weekly news analysis on Middle East developments to Inter Press Service and made periodic contributions to ForeignPolicy.com and The Christian Science Monitor.
In March 2010, she founded Just World Books. Over the eight years that followed, the company published 38 original titles on Middle Eastern and other international issues. In early 2018, the company entered a hiatus from issuing new titles though it keeps the existing titles in print and sells subsidiary rights for them. Cobban then spent more time running Just World Educational, which she served as Executive President. In Spring 2019, she resumed her writing career.
She is a member of Charlottesville Friends Meeting in Charlottesville, Virginia. Cobban used to be a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and formerly sat on the Middle East Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch. In 2007–08 she was a "Friend in Washington" with the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
She is married to William B. Quandt, who is the Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia.
Contributions to Middle East studies
Through her reporting and analytical work, Cobban has made notable contributions to the study of Palestinian politics, Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, Lebanese politics, Israeli-Syrian peacemaking, the US war in Iraq, and the broader study of the Middle East.
Palestinian politics
For her 1984 book The Palestinian Liberation Organisation: People, Power, and Politics she interviewed many founders and leaders of the PLO and used much original material gathered during her reporting work in Beirut in the late 1970s. In the book, she concluded that the center of gravity of the Palestinian national movement was shifting toward those Palestinians living inside their homeland, a diagnosis that proved correct when the First Intifada broke out in 1987. The book was heavily criticised in a review that Daniel Pipes wrote for the Washington Post.