My research asks: how is political order produced and maintained when formal institutions are weak — and what role do ambiguity, information control, and informal elite bargaining play in sustaining regimes that lack the capacity for comprehensive coercion?
I investigate this question across two connected strands. The first examines how authoritarian regimes govern information environments when formal rules are weak and enforcement is unpredictable. The second examines how electoral politics and elite bargaining shape political order in fragile and conflict‑affected states. Both strands are united by a concern with how order is achieved — and how it erodes — in contexts where formal institutions do less governance work than they claim to do. Methodologically, I draw on process tracing, comparative political analysis, and extensive multilingual elite interviewing in high‑risk environments.
Authoritarian Information Control and Media Governance
My central research programme examines how authoritarian regimes govern media and public debate when they lack the resources for comprehensive censorship or sophisticated surveillance. I am interested in how media compliance is produced in environments where formal rules are vague, enforcement is inconsistent, and journalists cannot reliably locate the boundaries of acceptable expression — and in what this reveals about the relationship between uncertainty, coercion, and political order.
This programme grew from my work as a broadcast journalist at the BBC World Service (BBC Persian, 2016–2019), where covering elections, security transitions, and regional politics gave me first‑hand insight into how journalists navigate politically constrained information environments. It developed through applied research as a Specialist Researcher for BBC Media Action, where I conducted elite interviews with Afghan media owners and journalists and contributed to survey research and focus group discussions on media dynamics, misinformation, and public perceptions of media practices under Taliban rule. It continues through my research fellowship at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Lund University, where I work on authoritarian information control, exile media, and human rights documentation. The empirical core is a multilingual interview corpus conducted in Dari and Pashto with media professionals working under Taliban governance. While developed from the Afghan case, this research addresses a wider pattern across authoritarian and hybrid regimes where uncertainty functions as a central instrument of control.
Electoral Politics and Political Order in Fragile States
My doctoral research at SOAS University of London (PhD, 2024) examined Afghanistan’s post‑2001 political order through 51 elite interviews conducted in Kabul with presidential candidates, campaign managers, and regional power brokers. I argue that the collapse of the Afghan republic was not only a security failure but a political one — rooted in structural tensions between internationally designed institutions and the realities of local bargaining and elite competition. The thesis develops two theoretical contributions: electoral performativity, the argument that elections in fragile states function less as mechanisms of democratic accountability than as rituals through which elites negotiate access to state resources and signal coercive capacity; and the holding‑power gap, which explains how asymmetries in organisational and coercive power between competing elites shape the distribution of electoral rents and the stability of post‑election settlements.
My current ESRC‑funded fellowship at Durham University, The Power of Bargaining: Elections, Rents, and War‑to‑Peace Transitions, consolidates and extends these findings through comparative analysis of how rent distribution and electoral competition interact during war‑to‑peace transitions.