Yasmina Abouzzohour

Yasmina Abouzzohour is an Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer at the Institute for the Transregional Study at Princeton University. Prior, she served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard University. Abouzzohour received her Ph.D. at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and her B.A., with honors, at the Department of Political Science and the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University.

A comparative political scientist specializing in regime persistence and transition, Abouzzohour is especially interested in employing qualitative and mixed methods to understand the impact of regimes’ interactions with citizens and opposition groups on their political and economic behavior. Much of her teaching and research lies at the juncture of politics and political economy, with particular emphasis on the Arab monarchies and Maghreb states. In her current book project, Why Does God Save the King? How Arab Monarchs Endure and Evolve, she employs a range of research methods to investigate long-term durability in modern Arab monarchies.

In other projects, Abouzzohour analyzes survey data to explore the determinants and implications of heightened public trust in the military in authoritarian and transitioning states and Twitter data to examine the impact of newly imposed taxes on state-society relations in rentier states. She is also interested in the shifts in regime behavior in the context of the global energy transition in the Middle East and North Africa.

Her work has been supported by the American Political Science Association, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Andrew Mellon Fund, the University of Oxford, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Project on Middle East Political Science, among others.

Degrees

• Ph.D. in Politics, University of Oxford
• B.A. in Political Science, Columbia University
• B.A. in French and Romance Philology, Columbia University