Expert Interviews is an exclusive series provided by The Gulf Nashra, where we sit down with leading researchers, policymakers, and analysts to examine the political, economic, and geopolitical dynamics shaping the Gulf, and what they mean for the rest of the world.
Today, we share our conversation with Dr. Bruno Schmidt-Feuerheerd. He is a Fellow by Examination (Junior Research Fellow) in Political and Developmental Studies at Magdalen College. He earned a PhD in Political Science from Trinity College. His research specializes in comparative politics and international relations, with a particular focus on the Arab Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf monarchies. His work examines authoritarian politics, political legitimation, nationalist mobilization, and grassroots movements, using both qualitative and computational methods to analyze Arabic-language sources, including about 100 original interviews with Saudi nationalists and patriots, archival work covering some 30,000 pages of a cultural magazine dating to the 1970s, and social media data that he collected over several months of field research in Saudi Arabia.
