Research Focus
My core expertise is in civil wars, rebel governance, and post-conflict political orders, with long-standing work on Kurdistan and Sri Lanka. I study how armed groups build and transform political authority, including power-sharing arrangements and the institutions of de facto authorities such as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES).
- Rebel governance and institutional design under conditions of conflict.
- Power-sharing, coalition dynamics, and authority formation in post-conflict settings.
- Comparative focus on Kurdistan, Sri Lanka, and the wider Middle East.
Current Work: Food Security & Conflict
I am a Research Fellow with the ITALIM project (“Italy and the International Politics of Food Security”) at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. The project focuses on the militarization of food (food weaponization) by state and non-state actors and on the two-way relationship between food insecurity and conflict, with attention to Middle East and North Africa contexts relevant to Italian foreign policy. The aim is to assess how food insecurity can trigger political instability, social unrest, migration, and conflict, and to develop recommendations that treat food access both as a post-conflict peacebuilding tool and as a proactive conflict-prevention strategy.
- How institutions anticipate, frame, and respond to food-security crises.
- Interaction between conflict dynamics, risk assessment, and humanitarian response.
Political Risk & Early Warning
I have worked on political risk analysis and early warning systems, focusing on crisis recognition failures and institutional knowledge filters, with empirical work on Sri Lanka and Israel–Palestine.
- Institutional blind spots and failure points in crisis recognition.
- Bridging academic findings with practitioner decision needs.
Regional Focus
My research includes sustained engagement with Kurdistan, Sri Lanka, and the wider Middle East, with attention to governance in (post-)conflict plural societies. These cases allow me to trace how political authority evolves across war, negotiation, and post-conflict governance.
Fieldwork & Methods
I have conducted fieldwork in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, Turkey, and Sri Lanka, and I work with interviews, field observation, conflict datasets, and document analysis.
- Qualitative fieldwork and interviews in conflict-affected contexts.
- Comparative case analysis and mixed-methods research design.