Frederick Deknatel is a journalist, editor, and fellow at Century International, where he writes about Middle Eastern affairs, with a focus on Syria's postwar reconstruction. He is the founder and editor of Hidden Cities, a new magazine that illuminates the world -- part travelogue, part global news brief. From 2021 to 2025, he was the founding executive editor of Democracy in Exile, the journal of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), which was founded by the slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. From 2017 to 2021, Freddy was the managing editor of World Politics Review, where he now writes a monthly column. He has also been a staff editor at Foreign Affairs.
His writing and reporting on the Middle East have appeared in The Nation, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, The National, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. His chapter on the politics of reconstruction in Syria was published in Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities, edited by James Cuno and Thomas G. Weiss (Getty Publications, 2022). His writing has also been anthologized in Out of Practice, a collection of the first ten issues of the wonderful but short-lived Even Magazine (once called “the old-school-by-young-people smarty-pants art journal”). In 2008 and 2009, he was a Fulbright fellow in Syria, where he also worked for the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR. He has an M.Phil. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St Antony's College, Oxford and a B.A. in history and Arabic from Vassar.
Contact him at frederickdeknatel [at] gmail [dot] com and on Bluesky @freddydeknatel. Photo by Stephanie Badini.
His writing and reporting on the Middle East have appeared in The Nation, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, The National, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. His chapter on the politics of reconstruction in Syria was published in Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities, edited by James Cuno and Thomas G. Weiss (Getty Publications, 2022). His writing has also been anthologized in Out of Practice, a collection of the first ten issues of the wonderful but short-lived Even Magazine (once called “the old-school-by-young-people smarty-pants art journal”). In 2008 and 2009, he was a Fulbright fellow in Syria, where he also worked for the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR. He has an M.Phil. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St Antony's College, Oxford and a B.A. in history and Arabic from Vassar.
Contact him at frederickdeknatel [at] gmail [dot] com and on Bluesky @freddydeknatel. Photo by Stephanie Badini.
