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. 

I am a PhD student in International Relations at the University of Oxford. My thesis explores questions of political subjectivity and hegemony in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. Embracing notions of contradiction, paradox, and fluidity, I trace the shifting terrains and scales of Jawlani anticolonial praxis amid Zionism’s attempts to produce colonial subjectivities. My research is supervised by Hashem Abushama and Yaacov Yadgar, and funded by Nuffield College and the ESRC.

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.