I’m an Assistant Professor of Politics in the Middle East at the University of Groningen. I was previously a Max Weber Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute and held research positions at Georgetown University Qatar, the George Washington University, and the Orient-Institut Beirut. I completed my PhD in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge.

I research how international order is made and contested at regional and global levels. My forthcoming book, Arms, News, and Lobbying: The Remaking of the Middle East Regional (Dis)Order (Edinburgh University Press), argues that recognition is constitutive of order. As the Middle Eastern regional order was in disintegration and up for grabs after the Arab uprisings, regimes fought to be recognised as sovereign, legitimate, and benevolent. Through arms procurement, news framing, and lobbying in Washington, they claimed positions in regional order by getting relevant others to see them the way they wanted to be seen, and to accept them on those terms. The book develops this argument through the cases of Egypt after the 2013 coup and Qatar during the 2017–21 Gulf crisis.

My current project looks at international order(ing) through a different lens: namely, ignorance. I examine how proponents of competing ordering visions deliberately produce ignorance—ranging from silences and strategic ambiguities, to denials and dismissals, to fabrications and disinformation—as a means to make and sustain order. Rather than approaching ignorance as a deficiency or an anomaly, this project builds on insights from the sociology of ignorance, treating it as a productive social force.

My research has been published in International Affairs, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, and Middle East Critique. You can find my publications here.

When I’m not working (but frankly when I am, too), I enjoy drinking coffee, eating gelato, making cinnamon rolls, and travelling.