I am a scholar of the international relations of the Middle East with particular expertise on Political Islam in the 1970s and 80s, and interests in wider debates about the role of religion, identity and ideology in global politics. More recently, I have also worked on the international politics of state repression. I warmly welcome inquiries from prospective PhD students with these or related interests.
A key aspect of my research has been about explaining the rise of Political Islam in the 1970s and 80s. I am particularly careful to provide a corrective to essentialist accounts of the role of religion in the Middle East. My efforts to contextualise Political Islam in wider socio-historical dynamics is best exemplified in my last book, Jihad in the City. Based on troves of archival research and hundreds of interviews, it explores how Lebanon's second city of Tripoli emerged as an Islamist stronghold in the 1970s and 80s out of a combination of regional influences, urban marginalization, colonial legacies and the declining appeal of leftist ideologies. Jihad in the City was the recipient of a Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Section on Middle East Politics. It was also reviewed in academic journals across disciplines such as in terrorism studies, social movements and the politics and international relations of the Middle East. Jihad in the City was based on my PhD, itself recipient of the Syrian Studies Association’s Best Thesis Prize. In 2022, I was invited to deliver the prestigious Paul Wilkinson Memorial Lecture at the University of St Andrews' Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, where I spoke about my book. I have spent much of 2022-2024 turning parts of Jihad in the City into a documentary in Arabic. Pan-Arab TV channel Al-Jazeera has recently bought the rights and will broadcast it in 2026.
Part of my effort to de-exceptionalise the study of Political Islam is also to go beyond homogeneising accounts and disaggregate it in different subtypes. While Sunni forms of Political Islam have attracted most scholarly attention, my most recent research has explored the dynamics of Shia Political Islam. Drawing on archival research and memoires, my recent article in conflict journal Security Studies provides the first history of Shia foreign fighters from across the region who fought on behalf of Tehran during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. With colleagues Morten Valbjørn of Aarhus University and Jeroen Gunning at King's College London, we also have a series of articles unpacking the evolution of Shia Political Islam. In a forthcoming issue of International Political Science Review, we push back against claims of inherent tension between Shia and Sunni Political Islam and instead point to a history of interactions and mutual inspiration, especially in the 1970s. In another article for Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, we explain that a key difference is that while Sunni Political Islam became more global from the 1990s, Shia Political Islam remained more local in the way it operated.
More broadly, my research also contributes to wider debates about the role of religion, identity and ideology in global politics. For instance, I recently published a piece in Survival which leverages research I did on the first year of HTS in power in Syria and adds to the growing scholarship on ideology after rebel victory in civil wars. It identifies what I call a "radical's dilemma" within the first year of rebel victory, when strongly ideological rebels transition to power and are faced with both external pressures to moderate and internal pressures to implement their agenda. Last year, I also wrote a review essay for Perspectives on Politics on the importance of thinking about ideologies in global politics as fluid, rapidly evolving and as constantly interacting with other more material factors. I am also interested in how ideologies diffuse across national settings. I have a Revise & Resubmit from the Journal of Global Security Studies in which I illuminate and unpack the South-South diffusion of ideologies in the 1960s and 70s including Maoism, pan-Arabism and Soviet-style Marxism through mechanisms of external promotion, socialization, emulation, and localization.
Another, quite different strand of my research concerns the international politics of state repression. Here as well, some of my research is linked to the Middle East. My first book, Ashes of Hama, was the first on the consequential yet little-researched February 1982 massacre by the Syrian army of 25,000 insurgents and civilians in Hama. It was awarded the Gates Sr Prize, reviewed in several journals including Foreign Affairs, and was ranked amongst the 2013 Best Books on the Middle East by Foreign Policy. More recently, I have expanded my research which now focuses on the rise of transnational repression - when authoritarian regimes reach across borders and to intimidate, punish or silence dissidents in exile. I currently lead a £100,000 grant to research the dynamics of transnational repression. Together with Anne Wolf and Lily Green at the University of Oxford, we have produced a dataset of over 200 state-led attacks on exiles living in the UK since the 1940s based on the analysis of thousands of news articles as well as government records in the archives. We recently presented the key findings of our dataset to MPs and staff at the UK Parliament, and we were delighted when Lord Alton, head of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, cited our research during a debate on transnational repression at the House of Lords. We are currently writing two journal articles out of our dataset, and I am preparing a book on the history of transnational repression.
Prior to Bristol, I was a postdoc at Aarhus University in Denmark and held a Junior Research Fellowship at New College, University of Oxford. In 2012-2016, I was a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, where I obtained my PhD. Here is my full CV.