Growing up in Baghdad during the years immediately following 2003 taught me that international relations is not an abstraction studied in seminar rooms — it is a daily lived experience for hundreds of millions of people whose lives are shaped by decisions made in capitals far from their own. That observation has guided every academic choice I have made since.
Academic Background
I completed my Bachelor's in Political Science at the University of Baghdad in 2022, graduating first in my cohort with a thesis on the post-2014 evolution of Iraqi sovereignty in the face of competing regional powers. Two years later I earned an MSc with distinction from Sciences Po Paris, where my dissertation examined how middle powers in the MENA region navigate the constraints imposed by great-power competition. Throughout both degrees I deliberately pursued coursework that combined theoretical depth with regional specialism, recognising that the most consequential questions in my field demand both.
Research Interests
My research focuses on the foreign-policy decision-making of states whose sovereignty is constrained by external intervention. I am particularly interested in how such states cultivate strategic autonomy in domains where formal sovereignty is incomplete — economic policy, security cooperation, and information environments. Iraq is the empirical centre of my work, but I read it as part of a wider class of cases that includes Lebanon, Afghanistan, and the Sahel states.
The questions that animate my proposed doctoral research are: How do post-intervention states construct foreign-policy agency under conditions of asymmetric dependence? What institutional configurations enable some such states to exercise meaningful autonomy while others remain proxies? And what role does domestic political competition play in shaping the answers?