Haian Dukhan

Haian is a political scientist at Teesside University who focuses his research on micro-local dynamics in the Middle East and works on relating these local patterns to the wider political system of which they are part. His main research interests are in Middle Eastern Politics, with a specific focus on issues related to tribalism, sectarianism, authoritarianism, and Islamism. He has taught politics and international relations at the universities of St Andrews, Leicester and Edinburgh, and held research positions at the Central European University in Austria and Roskilde University in Denmark.

He has been involved in multiple research projects over the past few years. One of them was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and was conducted at the Central European University, which sought to consider conditions arising in the unsteady and seemingly deadlocked condition of military and political stalemate that has emerged in the Middle East, specifically Syria and Iraq. This research led to the publication of an edited volume titled Spoils of War in the Arab East: Reconditioning Society and Polity in Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2024).

His second project at the University of St Andrews, funded by the Danish research council, focused on the instrumentalisation of sectarianism in Syria by the regime, opposition and by competitive interference of external powers, as well as the discourse in the trans-state traditional and new media framed in sectarian terms. This led to multiple research outputs, including an edited volume on Sectarianism and the Syrian Civil War (Routledge, 2025).