Salah Ben Hammou, M.A.

Welcome!

I am a Minerva Peace and Security Scholar Fellow (2023-2024) at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and a Ph.D. candidate in Security Studies at the School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs at the University of Central Florida. In Fall 2024, I will be joining the Baker Institute’s Edward P. Djerejian Center for the Middle East at Rice University as a Postdoctoral Research Associate.  

My research is centered on civil-military relations, military coups, and the politics of authoritarianism and democratization. My dissertation demonstrates the dynamics and consequences of civilian involvement in military coups. Specifically, I highlight the role of civilian constituencies in shaping post-coup political orders based on their sources of power. I use mixed methods to build and test my theory, relying on an originally-built dataset on civilian involvement in military coups between 1950-2017 and rich qualitative evidence from post-colonial Sudan.

To date, my research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Armed Forces & Society, Africa Spectrum, International Studies Review, and Journal of Global Security Studies. My public-facing scholarship has been published in outlets such as The Washington Post, Just Security, the Modern War Institute, The Loop, Political Violence at a Glance, The Cairo Review, and Tawazun: Index of Arab Civil-Military Relations. My writing and research have been cited in high-profile, non-academic outlets around the world like Newsweek, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Deutsche Welle, La Nacion, Dabanga Sudan, and The Congressional Research Service.

Service work is an integral part of my identity as a scholar. I currently serve as Co-Chair of the American Political Science Association’s Committee of Graduate Student Status in the Discipline. In addition, I am co-founder of the global online initiative, Jam3a: a Virtual MENA Workspace for Grad Students & Early Career Scholars, and founder/coordinator of Memoirs of the Middle East & North Africa. I also serve as a regular contributor at Arrested Dictatorship. I have also served as a Resident Graduate Fellow at the Prince Mohammed Bin Fahd Program of Strategic Research and Studies and The India Center. My work has been financially supported by the American Political Science Association, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Department of Defense.