Dr Maria Gloria Polimeno

Dr Maria Gloria Polimeno is Research Fellow at the SOAS Middle East Institute, University of London.

She is an interdisciplinary scholar of the Middle East. Many of her interdisciplinary research interests have been shaped by living and researching in the region. Her works focus on comparative politics with a particular emphasis on transformative authoritarianism, elites and political legitimacy, and political economy through the prism of the Social Development Goals framework. 

Before becoming a Research Fellow at the SOAS Middle East Institute, she lectured in International Relations and Politics at the University of York. As part of her appointments, she held teaching, supervisions and research positions at Russell Group universities, amongst which The Queen Mary University of London, SOAS, the University of Cambridge and the University of Exeter. In Fall 2024, she was selected as a Visiting Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Her works have been published in Mediterranean Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Democratisation, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, International Affairs, and other venues.  

She was Global Expert on Egypt and Tunisia in the ERC co-funded V-Dem project based at the University of Gothenburg and was a Global Expert on Egypt and Tunisia for the ERC funded DEMED Project led by the University of Glasgow, and a Middle East and North Africa country expert in the British Academy CITMODES-funded GLOBALCIT programme based at the European University Institute. 

She is an occasional writer on political and economic events in the region and her contributions featured in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Arab Pulse-Arab Barometer Stanford University, Qantara.de Institute for Foreign Relations, and The Loop European Consortium for Political Research

She holds a PhD in Middle East Politics from the University of Exeter and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. She is a member of the Council for British Research in the Levant, European Consortium for Political Research and a UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab Expert.

Her book, Egypt and the rise of fluid authoritarianism: Political ecology, power and the crisis of legitimacy, was published by Manchester University Press in December 2024. The book is a ground-breaking and intellectually engaging work on authoritarian discontinuities in Egypt following the shockwaves of the 2013 coup and the impact this has had at national and international political, social and economic levels. The book interrogates political ecology, power and the link to legitimacy along the sustainable development spectrum.

In 2024, she signed a new book contract as editor of The Routledge Handbook of the Environment and Middle Eastern Politics. It is a strongly interdisciplinary work that takes a critical and radical approach to nature and the Middle East. It aims to explore the inner complexity that surrounds the intersection between the environment and political and socio-economic structures, and how the former transforms the latter.

Dr Maria Gloria Polimeno's next research project deals with the governance of the environment, focussing on the survival of elites and the dynamics of structural resistance through nature. It lies at the intersection of environmental politics, comparative politics, international relations, European and British-Mediterranean relations and political economy.

A second area of comparative research she is developing addresses issues of citizenship, dispossession and the dynamics of resistance in the Middle East in the context of green industrialisation and the 'diplomacy of solidarity'. This leads to a combination of academic and semi-academic publications and a new book project.

A third project she is working on is ecocides in the Middle East. This is a larger comparative project that is additionally based on collaborations outside the academic world.