As an MPhil student on the MPhil Politics: European Politics and Society programme at the DPIR, I am currently researching candidate selection strategy in the UK. Candidate selections is an understudied area of political science, yet it is key to understanding how legislatures represent the broader population and how political parties respond to demands from the electorate. Using a novel dataset and predominantly quantitative analysis, I am investigating the competing internal incentives and electoral strategies that determine candidate selection behaviour in Britain's political parties.

Arwa Mokdad is a Middle East analyst with expertise in geopolitics, development, and public policy. Currently, she is a DPhil candidate researching conflict mediation within Yemen at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Professor Stathis Kalyvas. Her work focuses on local, regional, and international peace-building efforts within Yemen. By emphasising both the security interests of regional actors and the local buy-in necessary for sustainable peace, her research brings peace and security studies within dialogue. 

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 graduate in Politics (Comparative Government) from the University of Oxford. His research explores the uneven geography of democratic backsliding in federal systems, with a focus on how and why some subnational units maintain democratic stability amid national-level autocratizing pressures. His thesis examines the Indian case, where democratic decline under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the centre has not been uniformly replicated across the states.

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

As a DPhil candidate at DPIR and a Junior Researcher at the European Cyber Conflict Research Initiative (ECCRI), my research examines public-private interaction in cybersecurity governance. Supervised by Professor Lucas Kello, I focus on cyber conflict and collaboration around critical infrastructure. Triangulating a range of data sources, my empirically driven work contributes to depoliticising the contemporary debate by establishing a timely analytical understanding of underlying dynamics.