Shamiran Mako

Areas of Specialization: Comparative Democratization, Authoritarianism, Ethnic Conflict and Identity Politics, Contentious Politics, Military Interventions, and Post-Conflict State and Peacebuilding. Regional Focus: Middle East and North Africa

Shamiran Mako’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics with a focus on authoritarianism, civil wars, democratization, institutional capacity building, governing in divided societies, and American foreign policy with a regional interest on the Middle East and North Africa. Specifically, she explores the historical and contemporary drivers of inter and intra-state conflicts that produce weak and fragile states and examines ways in which successful conflict mitigating strategies relating to post-conflict state and peacebuilding can be applied to states in the MENA region.

Her first book project traces the institutional legacies of ethnic conflict in Iraq. It examines the ways in which historically embedded structural and institutional constraints in segmentally divided authoritarian polities like Iraq frame subsequent patterns of ethnic dominance and modes of inclusion and exclusion from state power, which in turn shape the mobilization calculus of communal groups during critical statebuilding periods. The book draws on archival research, elite interviews, and descriptive statistics relating to Iraq’s political development, particularly since 2003. Her second book project, under contract with Cambridge University Press, is a co-authored book with Valentine Moghadam of Northeastern University that explains divergent outcomes of the Arab Uprisings. The book examines the socio-economic and political dynamics that have shaped the trajectory of progress and stagnation across seven MENA-region country case studies.

From 2018-2019, Mako was a Visiting Scholar at Brown University’s Middle East Studies Program. Prior to that, she has been a Visiting Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Middle East Studies Program at Brown University, a research fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and a Carnegie Visiting Scholar for the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies at Northeastern University.