About me

A political scientist by background, Kaweh Kerami studies how elites bargain, cooperate, and compete over access to power and resources in conflict-affected societies, with particular attention to external intervention, authoritarian governance, and the politics of media and information.

I am a UKRI-ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Durham University’s School of Government and International Affairs. My current project, The Power of Bargaining: Elections, Rents, and War-to-Peace Transitions, examines how elections, rents and informal bargaining shape political order as states move from war to peace.

Two connected strands run through my work. One follows the bargains: how elites contend over power, rents and office, and how externally backed orders hold together or fragment after intervention. The other follows the information: how regimes manage opposition, media and dissent through ambiguous rules, uneven enforcement and negotiated coercion rather than overt repression. I work primarily on Afghanistan — a deep case of political order under acute state fragility — with wider interests in authoritarian and eroding democratic contexts.

At a glance

• Themes: elite bargaining and political order; authoritarian governance; media and information control; state fragility and external intervention.
• Methods: process tracing, comparative analysis, and multilingual elite interviewing in high-risk environments.
• Background: PhD (SOAS, 2024); previously BBC World Service and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, Lund University — full CV.