Ahmed Azim Wazeer

Ahmed Azim Wazeer

Oxford, United Kingdom

About

I am a DPhil candidate in Politics at the University of Oxford, affiliated with St. Antony's College and supervised by Professor Neil Ketchley. My research lies at the intersection of political economy, culture, and state-society relations, with a geographic focus on the Middle East. My doctoral work examines how state-led socio-economic transformation reshapes citizens' relationships with and imaginations of the state, with a case focus on Saudi Arabia. Drawing on a mixed-methods approach, my analysis probes how aspects of soft and discursive power, produced from above and below during periods of transformation, help both state and society negotiate a rapidly evolving future.

My studies are generously supported by the Middle East Centre at St. Antony's College, a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Canadian Centennial Scholarship Fund, and the Centre for Experimental Social Science at Nuffield College, among others. In the 2024–2025 academic year, I served as Stipendiary Lecturer in Politics at Trinity College, University of Oxford. Before Oxford, I worked as a political risk consultant at Eurasia Group and as a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. I received an MA in Arab Studies (Politics) with distinction from Georgetown University and a BCom from the University of British Columbia, after transferring from the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (Dhahran, KSA).

Research

Dissertation: The Production and Reception of Project State Discourse: Evidence from Saudi Arabia (in progress)

This dissertation examines how states pursuing ambitious socio-economic transformation manage the challenge of building and sustaining state-society relations during periods of rapid change. Drawing on Charles Maier's concept of the "project state" — a state type that seeks to transform not just institutions but society itself — the study develops a framework for understanding how such states must rebalance the symbols, discourses, and incentive structures that bind the state and citizen when the very foundations of the state's narrative and presence are rapidly evolving. Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 serves as the empirical case. The dissertation comprises three papers: the first examines how the new economy shapes public opinion, using a survey experiment; the second investigates how cultural producers participate in embedding new state-society narratives, through mixed methods combining network analysis and interviews; and the third analyses how media navigate crises that threaten to disrupt a carefully managed transformation narrative, using computational text analysis of a large corpus of Saudi newspaper coverage.

Selected Working Papers

An Autocratic Middle Class? State Dependency and Protest in the Middle East and North Africa

(with Neil Ketchley and Bruno Schmidt-Feuerheerd)
How does economic dependence on the state shape citizens' political behaviour? This paper examines the relationship between state-sector employment and protest participation across the Middle East and North Africa.

"Safe Punching Bags?" The Impact of Autocratic Status Challenges on Democratic Middle Powers

(with Isabella Cuervo-Lorens)
Presented at APSA 2025

What Does Middle East Studies Study?

(with Neil Ketchley and Thomas Hegghammer)
A disciplinary stocktaking of the field of Middle East Studies using text-as-data methods. Presented at BRISMES 2023

Teaching

University of Oxford, Stipendiary Lecturer and Tutor

Georgetown University, Teaching Assistant

Invited Talks

Contact

You may reach me at azim.wazeer@politics.ox.ac.uk.