Andrew Scott Cooper

Born and raised in New Zealand, Andrew Scott Cooper is a scholar of modern Middle East history with specialization in US-Iran relations during the Cold War. He is a Non-Resident Scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC. He is also a member of the Advisory Board at Royal Holloway, University of London, Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy. He began his career as the lead researcher on landmines at the United Nations and Human Rights Watch, co-founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Peace.

In his first book, The Oil Kings, Cooper mined a trove of newly declassified documents to reveal the secrets at the heart of American oil diplomacy in the Middle East during the first oil shock. He was the first scholar to conclusively prove that the oil markets destabilized Iran’s economy in the late 1970s. The Oil Kings said The Christian Science Monitor, “adds significant insight to one of the most important periods in the American relationship with petroleum.”