Professor Charles R H Tripp

Charles Tripp is Professor Emeritus of Politics with reference to the Middle East and North Africa and a Fellow of the British Academy.

His research interests include the nature of autocracy, state and resistance in the Middle East, the politics of Islamic identity and the relationship between art and power. He is currently working on a study of the emergence of the public and the rethinking of republican ideals in Tunisia.

Together with other colleagues in the department he was one of the founders of the Centre for Comparative Political Thought at SOAS

Articles

• “The State as an Always-Unfinished Performance: Improvisation and Performativity in the Face of Crisis” – Roundtable: Reevaluating the Nation-State, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 50 (2018) pp. 337-342
• “Theatres of Blood: performative violence in Iraq”, International Journal of Iraqi Studies, 12:2, (2018) pp. 167-81
• “Political Thinking Performed: popular cultures as arenas of consent and resistance”, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 48 (2021) pp. 7-23

Book sections

• “Art and Power”, in Venetia Porter with Natasha Morris and Charles Tripp Reflections: contemporary art of the Middle East and North Africa (London, British Museum Press, 2020) pp 24-31

• Middle East: states and ideologies, war and resistance, Islamic and comparative political thought
• The nature of autocracy and the sociology of power
• Art and Power