Shamiran Mako

Assistant Professor of International Relations

Shamiran Mako is an Assistant Professor of international relations and political science at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. She is also a member of the Graduate Faculty at the Political Science Department at Boston University. Her research and teaching focus on the international relations of the Middle East with a substantive emphasis on the politics of state formation and colonial legacies, ethnic politics, governance in divided societies, institutions and post-conflict statebuilding.

Her research explores the historical and contemporary drivers of inter and intra-state conflicts that produce weak and fragile states across the MENA region. She is the author of Structuring Exclusion: Institutions, Grievances, and Ethnic State Capture in Iraq (forthcoming, summer 2025 with Oxford University Press) and After the Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa, with Valentine Moghadam (2021), and co-editor of State and Society in Iraq: Citizenship under Occupation, Dictatorship, and Democratisation, with Benjamin Isakhan and Fadi Dawood (I.b. Tauris 2017). Her work has appeared in International Peacekeeping, International Politics, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Perspectives on Politics, MERIP, among other outlets.

In 2022, Mako was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship as Canada Research Chair in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the University of Waterloo. She has also held research fellowships at the Middle East Studies Center at the Watson Institute for International Affairs at Brown University, the International Affairs Program at Northeastern University, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. In addition to English, she is also fluent in Arabic and Assyrian/Aramaic.

Mako received my Ph.D. in politics from the University of Edinburgh, my MA in political science from Wilfrid Laurier University, and BA (Hon) in political science and political philosophy from York University in Toronto. She is an avid runner and immensely enjoy running in Boston and its suburbs.

Read more about Shamiran Mako’s work and her latest publications on her personal website.

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