Babak Mohammadzadeh

I am a final year PhD Candidate at the Department of Politics and International Studies in Cambridge, where I work on state-society relations in the Persian Gulf. My PhD topic is located at the intersection of political economy and international relations. Specifically, I aim to understand how processes of state-building and political centralisation are shaped by resource dependence and hydrocarbon exports. In doing so, I zoom in on the history of state development in Iran and Saudi Arabia, suggesting that diverging strategies for institution-building have strongly determined the global orientations of these two countries. More broadly, I am interested in historical sociology, foreign policy analysis and the politics of authoritarian regimes.