Thanos Petouris Email & Phone Number

I am an accomplished Yemen expert with more than ten years of academic and policy-oriented work experience on the country. I have just successfully concluded an 18 month-long consultancy position at a European Research Council funded project called VERSUS (Violence, Elites and Resilience in States under Stress) with the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. The aim of the project was to map out the various political elite networks of the country as they are being reshaped in the course of the current conflict. Its major output has been the creation of a comprehensive information database covering more than 500 political, military, religious, and business Yemeni elites, the ways in which they are interconnected and their role during the war.Currently I am also writing up my doctoral thesis in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. My academic research interests focus on the nationalist, anti-colonial movement in Aden and South Arabia and the subsequent decolonisation process from Britain.Over the past ten years I have provided advice to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and DfID on Yemen. I have given lectures at the Universities of London (SOAS, LSE, Birkbeck), Harvard, Athens, Warwick, and Exeter. I have participated in a number of collaborative investigative projects, notably this year’s Yemen Hackathon organised by Bellingcat and the Global Legal Action Network. In 2013 I convened one of the largest Middle East-related conferences at SOAS: “Yemen: Challenges for the Future”. My media appearances include BBC Arabic, BBC World Service, al-Jazeera English and Arabic, and Monocle 24 Radio.I have been visiting Yemen regularly since 2005 and I lived in the country for almost three years between 2005–2013. During that time I have had the chance to travel to most parts of the country and familiarise myself with its history, politics and social variations. As part of my research fieldwork I have interviewed a large number of former and current political actors. Apart from fluency in oral and written English, I possess a good working knowledge of Arabic, and a number of European languages.My published work can be found in: https://soas.academia.edu/ThanosPetouris.