Assistant Professor
Salam Alsaadi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia. His research examines the politics of authoritarian regimes, political transitions, and contentious politics, with a regional focus on the Middle East and North Africa. His research has been published in the American Political Science Review and Comparative Politics, and his commentary has appeared in Foreign Affairs and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
His book project examines the survival of minority-dominated autocracies, drawing on a novel dataset of minority-dominated regimes from 1900 to 2015 and interview data from fieldwork in Sudan, Bahrain, Lebanon, and London, UK. The book is based on his dissertation, which received an honorable mention for the 2026 Juan Linz Best Dissertation Award from the APSA Democracy and Autocracy Section.
Alsaadi received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto in 2025. Before joining UGA, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (2025–2026).
