Professor Gareth Stansfield

Director of Research

As Director of Research, Gareth oversees the Institute's research agenda, developing networks between academic research, the policy / think-tank community and end-users, driving funding bids, consultancy and contract research, and shaping research initiatives.

Gareth gained his BA, MA, and PhD degrees from the University of Durham. His PhD was awarded in 2001 and addressed the political development of the de facto Kurdish state that had emerged in Iraq in 1991. His career at Exeter started in 2002 when he won a Leverhulme Special Research Fellowship to look at the possibilities for the rehabilitation and reconstruction of Iraq following the sanctions regime.

Gareth was then appointed to a Lecturership in Middle East Politics upon completion of the Leverhulme Fellowship in 2004, and was promoted to a Readership in 2005 and a Personal Chair in 2007. He is an Associate Fellow of the Middle East Programme at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs), and an Associate Fellow of the Program on Ethnic Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania.

His current research centres on the political development of post-2003 Iraq, particularly the interaction of religious and ethnic groups and conceptions of nationalism and federalism, and on Gulf security, including conflict resolution and management measures in divided societies. With Iraq as a focus, he has written extensively on the dynamics of political mobilisation in the post-2003 period. Gareth is also a Visiting Professor in the FCO, attached to the Middle East and North Africa Research Group.

Gareth authored a short commentary piece on Israel, published on the RUSI website in November 2012.