Mary Fitzgerald is a writer, researcher and consultant specialising in the Mediterranean region with a focus on Libya. She has worked on Libya for more than a decade. She spent several months on the ground during Libya’s 2011 uprising, lived in Tripoli in 2014, and continues to make regular trips to the country. She has worked with the International Crisis Group (ICG), United States Institute of Peace (USIP), the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and the European Institute of the Mediterranean (IEMED) among others. She has consulted for a number of international organisations working in Libya including in the areas of peace building and civil society. She is a Non-Resident Scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, King’s College London, and an Associate Fellow at ISPI in Milan. Mary has worked on wider initiatives with UNESCO, the Anna Lindh Foundation, the British Council and other cultural organisations. She is a consultant with the War Childhood Museum, the world’s only museum dedicated to documenting the experience of children in conflict. She is a trustee of the Brussels think-tank Friends of Europe. Her work has appeared in publications including the Economist, Foreign Policy, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, Politico, World Politics Review, the Guardian, Monocle, and Roads & Kingdoms. She is a contributing author to an edited volume on Libya’s 2011 uprising published by Hurst/Oxford University Press and a contributing author to an edited volume on violence and social transformation in Libya published in 2023 by Hurst/Oxford University Press Mary is a frequent contributor to international broadcast media such as the BBC (including BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent), NPR and RFI. She has also worked on a number of award-winning radio documentaries for the BBC, one of which – on post-conflict Northern Ireland – won a Gold Sony Radio Academy Award. She has given talks and participated in panel discussions at the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics, UCLA, Chatham House, Carnegie, and several other institutions in Europe and the US.
As a journalist, Mary began her career reporting on post-conflict Northern Ireland. She spent seven years as a staff foreign correspondent for the Irish Times, reporting from more than 40 countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Myanmar. She has also reported on conflict and post-conflict dynamics in Darfur, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Chad, Iraq, Bosnia, Palestine/Israel, Kosovo and Spain’s Basque region. She is a former Laurence Stern Fellow at the Washington Post.
Mary lives in Marseille in the south of France.
