Arwa Mokdad is an MPhil candidate researching conflict mediation within Yemen. Her work focuses on local, regional, and international peace-building efforts within Yemen. Growing up between the U.S. and Middle East, Arwa is interested in the role of foreign actors within the region as well as local activism and perceptions of intervention. 

Arwa also works with Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation as a Peace Advocate. Through this work, she supports aid programs in Yemen while participating in policy efforts in the U.S. 

In 2019, I made the leap from a small town in Lithuania to the University of Essex in the UK, armed with a limited grasp of English. Despite the beautiful challenges that shaped me as an individual, I am successfully progressing towards the completion of my MPhil degree in European Politics and Society at the University of Oxford.

Research interests

• Populism
• Political communication
• EU foreign policy
• Post-communist politics in Central Eastern Europe

The combination of theoretical knowledge with practical experience at:

I am a second year MPhil Politics (Comparative Government) student researching online far right groups using social movement theory and computational text analysis methodology.

• Main Research Areas
  • conceptualising/typologising the American far-right landscape
  • strategic narratives
  • conspiracy theories (QAnon)
  • collective action

Madhav Singh is an MPhil student in Politics (Comparative Government) at the University of Oxford. His current research delves into the strategies of democratic resilience, with a particular focus on the variances in state responses to democratic challenges within federal systems. His work is pioneering in its examination of an unexplored aspect of the contemporary Indian political scene: the resilience of state-level democratic practices in the face of national-level institutional strains, especially under the governance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Sam Bither is a Fulbright Study/Research Grantee at the Universidade dos Açores in São Miguel, Portugal.

As an MPhil Politics: European Politics and Society student at DPIR, I am researching Big Tech's role in European cybersecurity governance. Specifically, my research traces whether and to what extent these actors have had an over-time effect on the dominant normative paradigms of European cybersecurity governance. And, if so, which avenues of non-state/ state interaction are the most relevant. Triangulating a range of data sources, I focus on expert interviews.