Academic Research
I am PhD candidate (ABD) at the Department of Politics at Princeton University. My academic research draws on political science, political psychology and sociology, and seeks to understand and highlight the lived experience of politics in the daily lives of citizens across the Middle East, with a particular focus on Iraq, Lebanon and Syria.
My dissertation seeks to explains why some political parties operating in clientelistic systems maintain electoral loyalty while systematically under-distributing material goods to their supporters. Conventional theories of clientelism assume a transactional logic: patrons provide material benefits, clients provide votes. When patrons under-deliver, clients should defect to competitors offering better terms. My main test cases are the Shia Sadrist Movement in Iraq, the largest political movement in the country, and the Lebanese Forces, a Maronite party, in Lebanon.
From a trip to Mosul