Wajd Beshara

Wajd Beshara is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Sciences Po. Her doctoral project looks into how the Palestinian question is implicated in the politics of identity in the Arab Middle East countries. It seeks to disentangle the relationship between identification and values, on the one hand, and policy attitudes and political interest perceptions with respect to the Palestine-Israel conflict, on the other. 

Through a comparative analysis of public opinion trends in the Arab countries bordering Palestine-Israel, it contributes to our understanding of how the Palestinian question relates to broader debates on identity, values, and political interests in the region. Ultimately, it brings theoretical work on social and political identity into dialogue with historical and sociological accounts of the interplay between the Arab-Israel conflict and the various constructions of Arab identity and national interests, and uses insights from these distinct bodies of scholarship to further the analysis of public opinion in the region.

To provide a holistic study of public opinion, the project employs a mixed-methods research design combining traditional and experimental surveys with media discourse analysis.

Wajd holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Durham University and a master’s degree in digital sociology from the University of Edinburgh. Her previous research has looked into political behavior and public opinion trends in the MENA. Her master’s thesis focused on the evolution of political grievances during the Arab Uprisings of 2011, and considered how protest demands in Tunisia and Egypt evolved from primarily economic concerns to broader political claims. 

She then continued to develop these interests as a research assistant at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, working primarily with the Arab Opinion Index, a cross-national survey of socio-political attitudes in the MENA .

Thesis working title: The Palestinian Question, Defining National Identity, and Positioning the Self in the Arab Middle East

Thesis supervisor: Kevin Arceneaux