Area of research:
My dissertation examines how states pursuing wholesale transformation of their socioeconomic order sustain political authority when the institutions that once supported it are themselves being remade.
Taking Saudi Arabia under Vision 2030 as a contemporary project state, it traces this rebalancing across three sites over which the state holds differing degrees of control: citizens' responses to prestige investment abroad, tested through a survey experiment; the screen industry the state built after 2016, mapped through network analysis and interviews; and newspaper coverage of a major state crisis, analysed computationally.
My work draws on Arabic-language sources and fieldwork in the Kingdom.
College: St Antony's
Supervisor: Neil Ketchley
Ahmed's personal website