I am a Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA). I study economic coercion, foreign policy and domestic politics. I recently completed my PhD at the Graduate School of the Social and Behavioural Sciences (GSBS) at the University of Konstanz. In my dissertation, I focus on economic sanctions and research when leaders use sanctions as a foreign policy tool and sources of bias in that decision. I argue that domestic constraints—an aspect that has been largely neglected in the study of sanctions—and international incentives influence leaders’ decisions to impose, manage, and terminate the coercive measures.

At the GIGA, I am currently working in the project “Sanctions Termination in Times of Crises” funded by the German Research Foundation. In this project we focus on the effect of economic shocks and humanitarian crises on decisions of sanctions termination. Previously, I was working in another sanctions project that resulted with the creation of the International Sanctions Termination Dataset: A large-N dataset containing information on the imposition, design, termination, and outcome of 399 international sanctions cases imposed from 1990 to 2018.

My work has been published in International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Peace Research, European Economic Review, Review of International Economics, and Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen.

I completed my BA and MA in Political Science at the University of Mannheim, focusing on international relations and quantitative methods. I was a visiting Fulbright PhD Student at the American University in Washington DC and a visiting DAAD Graduate Student at the Johns Hopkins University. When I am not doing research I am dancing, hiking, watching/playing football or visiting my family in Egypt.

Download my resumé .