Dr Adel Bakawan, founder and current director of the French Centre for Research on Iraq (CFRI), is a Franco-Iraqi sociologist who is particularly active in research institutions specialising in the Middle East. He was the director of the iReMMO research department in 2020-2021, and of the Centre for the Sociology of Iraq at Soran University (Iraq) from 2017 to 2021, and he is a research associate at IFRI's Turkey and Middle East Programme and at CAREP Paris. In 2010, he defended his thesis on the Islamist movement in Iraqi Kurdistan and then became an associate researcher at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS). He has also been a sociology lecturer at the University of Évry since 2011. He remains attached to his homeland, which he visits regularly, and pays particular attention to the country's issues in the human and social sciences and geopolitics. He specialises in Kurdish issues, Islamism, jihadism, terrorism, nationalism and militancy in the Middle East.

In 2021, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the Iraqi state, Adel Bakawan confirmed his dedication to Iraqi research by creating the French Centre for Research on Iraq. With the goal of providing objective knowledge on Iraq, he created the first French-speaking think tank specialised in this country. This novel approach is based on the idea of providing the public, both professionals and specialists in Iraq, with a broad understanding of the various issues at stake in the Arab world and Iraq's place in it. He is active in the field and has been invited to numerous conferences and seminars from Erbil to Baghdad, via Paris and Sulaymaniyah (Rencontres de l'Institut du monde arabe and CAREP, conferences for Sciences Po Paris, Lille, Strasbourg, Grenoble and Bordeaux, debate at IFRI, Forum Meri, summer and winter school at iReMMO, etc.).