Lisa Blaydes

Studies of contemporary authoritarian politics tend to focus on the institutional features of regimes, particularly the extent to which autocrats rely on militaries, political parties, or personalization of power to maintain control. Faculty fellow Lisa Blaydes studies how social identity categories are generated and reproduced by authoritarian regimes in order to maintain forms of political, economic, and social control in the contemporary Middle East. 

Blaydes is professor of political science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Princeton University Press, 2018). She was a Mellon Foundation Fellow at CASBS during in 2015-16 and was a returning CASBS fellow in 2023-24.

For more, please visit https://politicalscience.stanford.edu/people/lisa-blaydes