Welcome! I am Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin. My research examines political dissidents who engage in violent and nonviolent resistance targeting autocratic rulers, particularly in the Middle East. These dissidents are typically overlooked by Western policymakers, and violently repressed by their domestic rulers. In spite of their exposure to extremely high risks, they engage in numerous resistance efforts at both collective and non-collective levels. My research sheds light on this behavior by tracing the cognitive processes underlying their political choices, identified from ethnographic interviews and computational methods.