Abdullah Yassen is Policy and Advocacy Adviser at Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in Iraq and former Assistant Professor of Public International Law at Erbil Polytechnic University. Yassen received a PhD in International Refugee Law from Newcastle University. Yassen research has focused on the social sciences, conducting multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary empirical research, notable in relation to Iraq as a country of refuge. Yassen is Chair of the Research and Advocacy Network on Statelessness in The MENA (RANS MENA) and Researcher at the REF-ARAB project (2019-2023, an interdisciplinary research project at the University of Oslo on refugee protection in the Arab Middle East funded by the Research Council of Norway), and member of the advisory board for the BEYOND Project (University of Oslo, funded by the European Research Council 2021-2026). Yassen is also the country expert on citizenship for GLOBALCIT, based at the European University Institute and the Iraqi consultant for the UNESCO Institute for lifelong learning. Yassen was appointed External Adviser for the development of the training curriculum on resettlement to the European Union Asylum Agency (EUAA, formerly EASO, 2017-2019).