Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of International Relations & Political Science at the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID). I earned a PhD in political science from Stanford University in 2020. I previously served as a pre-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative and a post-doctoral associate in the Princeton University Department of Near Eastern Studies. At the Graduate Institute, I serve as faculty affiliate at the Centre on Conflict, Development, and Peacebuilding and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy.
My research examines how local political institutions and elites shape broader patterns of state-building in the modern Middle East. My current book project focuses on how local governance has shaped the process of state-building in Lebanon. Using a multi-method approach grounded in two years of fieldwork between 2016 and 2020, I argue that governing elites in Lebanon’s central state rely on municipal governments and elections to reward loyalty and punish opposition. I show that this distributive strategy foreclosed opportunities to hold incumbents accountable at the ballot box, producing an equilibrium of poor governance and predatory elite behavior.
My other research has been published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Party Politics, Journal of Peace Research, and Politics & Religion. Prior to entering graduate school, I received my BA in public policy from Princeton University. My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the University of Gothenburg Program on Governance and Local Development, the Stanford Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the Freeman Spogli Institute, and the Stanford King Center on Global Development. My work has also been featured in media outlets such as the Washington Post, Middle East Monitor, An-Nahar, Raseef22, and the Project on Middle East Political Science’s podcast.