Ali Allawi is an Iraqi politician and author. From 2003-2004 he served as Minister of Trade and Minister of Defence in the cabinet appointed by the Interim Iraq Governing Council. Subsequently, he was Minister of Finance between 2005-2006 in the Iraqi Transitional Government. He has since authored several books on Iraq and the region: The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace, as well as The Crisis of Islamic Civilization and most recently Faisal I of Iraq. He spent several years with the World Bank Group before founding and chairing a developing countries focussed investment banking firm.. He has been a visiting fellow at Princeton and Harvard, and was a research professor at the National University of Singapore. Between May 2020 and August 2022, Ali Allawi served as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of the Republic of Iraq. Iraq . He earned an SB in Civil Engineering from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

He has recently completed the manuscript for a book on the economic history of the developing world. The book, The Chasm, is slated to be published by Yale University Press in the autumn of 2023.