Born and raised in Syria, a country governed by an authoritarian regime, Tala Alahmar (G’25) witnessed the events of the 2011 Arab Spring unfold. Over weeks and months, she saw external pressures from other countries calling for democratic governance and began noticing the structure and powers of democracy at play.
“The concept of democracy was something that was very abstract. I remember when the Arab spring started in 2011, and different countries were calling for democratic governance, and I didn’t really know what that meant or what it entailed for Syria,” she said.
Tensions grew, and the Syrian civil war began when she was just 11 years old. After Alahmar graduated from high school, her family immigrated to the United States. She arrived with a passion for politics and a desire to understand how she could play a part in preventing future conflict.
Tala Alahmar shakes the hand of Georgetown University Interim President Robert M. Groves during Commencement in May 2025.
Those subjects continued to captivate Alahmar throughout her undergraduate study, and she knew she wanted to study politics and democracy at an advanced level through a graduate degree. Georgetown University’s Master of Arts in Democracy & Governance program proved to be the perfect fit for her background and interests.
Learning from faculty experts in democratization and discussing electoral challenges with classmates from across the globe motivated her to conduct research on risks to electoral integrity that she hopes can help preserve and promote democracy internationally.
“My hopes for the research that I did, and the work that I’m doing right now, is that it actually goes and does good in the world and prevents someone else at 11 from looking around and seeing destruction.”
Tala Alahmar (G’25)
Passion Meets Purpose
As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Alahmar felt her interest grow in understanding how political systems govern and make decisions. After an experience abroad in Barcelona, Spain, enhanced her understanding of international relations, she began to think more critically about her experiences in Syria through a different lens. This curiosity drove her to eventually want to pursue a more focused graduate degree.
“And I remember asking myself, ‘Why are there so many external forces? Why is there pressure from different countries?’” she said. “I started exploring that more and more in my classes. When I graduated, I felt like I was just starting to scratch the surface, and I really wanted to dive deeper into this field.”
Studying democracy and governance at Georgetown University gave Tala Alahmar a global sociopolitical context through which to interpret her childhood experiences during the Syrian revolution and empowered her to conduct research in electoral integrity to promote democracy internationally.
Alahmar enrolled in the Master of Arts in Democracy & Governance program at Georgetown, inspired by the program’s commitment to promoting democracy, human rights and good governance. Initially planning for a career in foreign service, she realized how studying democracy ties into foreign service, public policy and other fields critical for successful intergovernmental relations.
She started connecting what she was learning in the classroom to her childhood memories of the Syrian revolution and framing those experiences in a larger sociopolitical context.
“I was starting to understand the theory behind democracy,” Alahmar said. “It really was very fascinating to me to understand the process, and be able to apply it to countries that participated in the Arab Spring and see when democratization works and when it doesn’t.”
At Georgetown, she found a community of students, faculty and staff as committed as she was to understanding how democracy takes shape and analyzing the new risks it faces in an age of misinformation.
“And I remember the moment where everything really clicked is when the regime in Syria fell, and for the first time in my classes, we were applying everything that we were learning to the country where I grew up, and it all felt very surreal. And it really helped me understand democratization.”
Tala Alahmar (G’25)
Conducting Research that Matters
Inspired by her growing understanding of democratic concepts, Alahmar accepted an offer to work as a research assistant within Georgetown’s Department of Government. She joined a student team under the guidance of Jeffrey Fischer, an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown and expert on international electoral policy and practice, on The Education on Risks to Electoral Integrity (EREI) Project, focusing on using artificial intelligence (AI) to forecast election risks in democratic countries.
The EREI research Alahmar worked on was inspired by studies pointing to fraud, interference and denialism as factors causing democratic elections to become more contentious. Her research aimed to find how to confidently predict when these events might happen so that they could be prevented, protecting electoral integrity by understanding legitimate risks versus deceptive claims.
With Fischer leading the EREI project, the team realized they could use artificial intelligence (AI) to learn more about the history of a country, its elections and the likelihood of electoral violence in future events.
The first elections they examined took place in Madagascar and Argentina. Using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude, they examined selected risk categories including vote fraud, electoral violence, cyberattacks and disinformation. They experimented with how to best structure prompts to predict electoral risks based on previous election data and a country’s current landscape, as told through publicly available news stories.
Alahmar worked with Jeffrey Fischer, an adjunct lecturer in Georgetown’s Democracy and Governance program, on a team that assembled the Forecasting Electoral Risks toolkit.
Luck had it that a classmate in the Democracy & Governance program was from Madagascar, and this personal connection helped Alahmar consider the real-world effects of election results. Connecting with her friend’s father, who still lives in Madagascar, Alahmar learned about citizen attitudes regarding the upcoming election and was inspired to approach the research from a regional perspective.
Realizing the need to evolve the research scope, the team applied for and received a grant from Georgetown’s Initiative on Pedagogical Uses of Artificial Intelligence (IPAI). They expanded their focus to include upcoming elections in six additional countries across three continents: North Macedonia, Panama, Lithuania, South Africa, Mexico and Mongolia.
This research ultimately led to the development of the Forecasting Electoral Risks Toolkit for students and practitioners who want to actively participate in predicting electoral risks. The toolkit includes sample prompts with recommendations and general best practices around this type of AI prediction work. The team’s long-term goal is that the toolkit can be used by governments around the world to identify possible issues of electoral violence, protect civilians and defend human rights.
Planning a Path Forward
Alahmar graduated from the M.A. in Democracy & Governance program in May 2025 while working as a foreign policy fellow at the U.S. House of Representatives.
Alahmar, left, graduated with her master’s in May 2025.
She sees the potential in using AI in the field with human supervision, particularly to synthesize data used to monitor and evaluate foreign aid and democracy assistance efforts. To Alahmar, democracy assistance and diplomacy are key tools of soft power, especially within national security and foreign policy strategy.
“[My work is] a reminder to my younger self that no matter what the circumstances are, you can always learn something and turn it into a positive experience that helps others,” she said.