Razan Ghazzawi

Dr. Razan Ghazzawi, (Arabic: رزان غزاوي; born 1980) is a Syrian-Palestinian blogger, campaigner, teacher, and activist, originally from Homs in Syria and Gaza in Palestine. Ghazzawi finished their PhD in Gender Studies and International Relations at the University of Sussex. They currently work as a tenure-track assistant professor in Queer Studies at Oregon State University, USA, since September 2023. Ghazzawi has been highly involved as a dissident since they started blogging in 2005, and weaponized their blogging to disseminate information about Syrian regime human rights violations following the 2011 Syrian Uprising. Ghazzawi has been particularly outspoken on activists' arrests and the violations of human rights committed by the Bashar al-Assad government, as well as on the sectarianism, Arab racism, and transphobia and homophobia towards Syrian ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities within Syrian cisgender and straight activist communityand opposition in diaspora and exile. Ghazzawi was called "iconic blogger and leading activist" by The Telegraph. Jillian York (who has been called "one of the leading scholars on Internet control and censorship") wrote that Ghazzawi was "one of [their] heroes."