About

Shamiran Mako is an Assistant Professor of international relations and political science at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and a member of the Graduate Faculty at the Political Science Department at Boston University. Her research and teaching focus on the international relations of the Middle East, with a substantive emphasis on the politics of state formation and colonial legacies, ethnic politics, governance in divided societies, institutions, and post-conflict statebuilding. Her current book project, forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2025 and titled Structuring Exclusion: Institutions, Grievances, and Ethnic State Capture in Iraq, examines the relationship between elites, state institutions, exclusion, and ethnic conflict in Iraq throughout formative statebuilding periods. In this work, she traces the longitudinal effects of British colonial institutional development on patterns of ethnic dominance and exclusion from governance across subsequent statebuilding periods. She develops a framework of the ethnic selectorate to trace how ethnic elites capture and reinforce group dominance through state institutions to elucidate the processes that structure group grievances over time. Mako is the author of After the Arab Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored with Valentine Moghadam (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and co-editor of State and Society in Iraq: Citizenship under Occupation, Dictatorship, and Democratisation, with Benjamin Isakhan and Fadi Dawood (I.B. Tauris, 2017). She received her Ph.D. in politics from the University of Edinburgh, her MA in political science from Wilfrid Laurier University, and a BA (Hon) in political science and political philosophy from York University in Toronto. In 2022, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship as Canada Research Chair in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the University of Waterloo. She has also held research fellowships at the Middle East Studies Center at the Watson Institute for International Affairs at Brown University, the International Affairs Program at Northeastern University, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. In addition to English, she is fluent in Arabic and Assyrian/Aramaic.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Political economy
• Law
• Criminology
• Public administration
• Demography
• Economics
• Psychology
• Development economics

Selected publications

• 1 Arrested History

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2026-05-21

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• Afterword: Consociationalism and the State: Situating Lebanon and Iraq in a Global Perspective

  Nationalism and Ethnic Politics · 2024-01-02 · 2 citations

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  In this afterword to the special issue on Consociationalism and the State: Lebanon and Iraq in Comparative Perspective, we reflect on the insights from the articles in the special issue and their contributions to the wider field of consociationalism studies, including the relationship between the state, state formation, and consociationalism; the interplay between consociationalism and identity construction and change; and the functionality, longevity, and agility of the consociational state. We suggest that the emergent research agenda on consociationalism and the state should engage further with ideas of agency and with wider cross-regional comparisons from the global south in order to show how historically contingent developments precondition conflict processes, group grievances, and post-conflict preferences in power-sharing systems.

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• Marketing Democracy: The Political Economy of Democracy Aid in the Middle East <i>by Erin A. Snider</i>

  Political Science Quarterly · 2023-01-01

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  Journal Article Marketing Democracy: The Political Economy of Democracy Aid in the Middle East by Erin A. Snider Get access Erin A. Snider. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2022. 250 pp. $100.00. Shamiran Mako Shamiran Mako Boston University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, qqad051, https://doi.org/10.1093/psquar/qqad051 Published: 12 July 2023

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• The Age of Counter-Revolution: States and Revolutions in the Middle East. By Jamie Allinson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 302p. $89.99 cloth, $29.99 paper.

  Perspectives on Politics · 2023-06-01

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• Response to Jamie Allinson’s Review of <i>After the Arab Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa</i>

  Perspectives on Politics · 2023-06-01

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• Divided Opposition, Fragmented Statebuilding: Elite Bargaining in Pre- and Post-2003 Iraq

  International Peacekeeping · 2023-06-21 · 4 citations

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  Elite cohesion structures interethnic bargaining and institutional design in post-conflict divided societies. Although works have explored how interethnic elite bargaining affects institutional design and conflict and cooperation in multiethnic states, less attention has been paid to historical antecedents that precondition bargaining strategies and outcomes in post-conflict spaces. This article explores elite bargaining dynamics among Iraqi dissident and exiled elites prior to 2003 to explain fractionalization and incongruent institutional design following regime change. Treating elite interactions as antecedent conditions for explaining statebuilding outcomes, it situates Iraq’s informal consociational power-sharing institutional design, muhassasa, within preceding patterns of interethnic fragmentation of the anti-Ba‘thist opposition movement prior to 2003. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with dissident elites from Iraq’s pre-2003 opposition and exiled groups and American policymakers, this paper illustrates how ethnic elite competition for control and state capture impeded the adoption and design of consensual and durable power-sharing institutions following regime change. Thus, although collective grievances with Ba‘thist-era exclusion and repression facilitated interethnic mobilization among disparate elite, expedient statebuilding and the reliance on fractionalized opposition groups obstructed the development and evolution of a cohesive, durable, and inclusive conflict mitigating institutional design after 2003.

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• Gender Relations and Women’s Mobilizations

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-07-22 · 1 citations

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  The chapter elucidates the book’s gender variable. It provides details for each country to show not only how women were affected by the Arab Spring protests, but more significantly, how gender relations and women’s mobilizations shaped the nature of the protests and the aftermath. It begins with a synopsis of feminist studies on women’s movement organizing and the impact on public policies, gender equality and violence, and the relationship between women’s autonomous movements, civil society formation, and democratization. It then applies these insights to the seven country cases, revealing that only in Tunisia, and to a lesser extent Morocco, had there been societal change in the direction of women’s autonomous organizing, influence, and political empowerment.

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• Civil Society

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-07-22

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  The chapter focuses on the role of civil society as a determining factor in the Arab Spring uprisings and their outcomes in the seven country case studies. It begins by revisiting the literature on, and debates over, civil society and its relationship to the state and political change, distilling two approaches. In one, civil society is a separate and autonomous sphere essential to democracy; it protects individuals and groups and gives them voice vis-à-vis the power of the state and, in some interpretations, the market. The other more skeptical approach posits that civil society is either an extension of the state apparatus or a sphere that provides legitimacy to the status quo and thus helps to reproduce it; civil society may be able to compel the ruling elite to enact some reforms, but it has neither the capacity nor the will to produce large-scale systemic change. We argue that both have merit and that each is context-specific, and we distinguish civil society in advanced capitalist democracies from that in authoritarian settings. We examine the strength and capacity of civil society prior to, during, and after the uprisings in each of our cases, showing that the strongest were present in Tunisia and Morocco.

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• Findings and Conclusions

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-07-22 · 1 citations

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  This final chapter reiterates the book’s explanatory framework and overarching thesis. We have argued for an integrated and holistic explanatory framework that accounts for structural and societal factors and external and internal forces: the state and political institutions, civil society, gender relations and women’s mobilizations, and international influences. Whether or not a region or cluster of countries is prepared to embark on a democratic transition depends on socioeconomic, institutional, and cultural preconditions along with the nature of international connections and interventions. These structures, institutions, and social forces shaped both the possibility for a democratic transition and its trajectory across our seven cases. In particular, we reiterate the significance of the presence or absence of strong women’s rights movements and of international intervention in our seven cases, and we posit that our framework has relevance beyond the Arab Spring cases.

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• Subverting Peace: The Origins and Legacies of de-Ba’athification in Iraq

  Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding · 2021 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Lustration, as an instrument of transitional justice, determines the extent to which members of the former regime or combatant groups can be reintegrated into a democratizing state. This article examines the effects of de-Ba'athification in the lead up to and following foreign-imposed regime change in Iraq. I demonstrate that exclusive and unconstrained lustration created an institutional mechanism that targeted and excluded key segments of the population as perceived regime collaborators, which subverted peacebuilding during the transitional period of the occupation. I conclude by illuminating the enduring effects of exclusionary lustration on subsequent attempts at state-and peacebuilding in divided, post-colonial societies.

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Frequent coauthors

• Valentine M. Moghadam

  12 shared

• Sargon Donabed

  Roger Williams University

  5 shared

• Hannibal Travis

  Florida International University

  2 shared

• Benjamin Isakhan

  2 shared

• Allison McCulloch

  Brandon University

  1 shared

• Alistair D. Edgar

  1 shared

• Marc Lemieux

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., International Relations and Political Science

  Boston University

Awards & honors

• Fulbright Scholarship as Canada Research Chair in Global Gov…