Christopher M. Davidson, Fellow at the ECIA, is Reader in Middle East Politics at the University of Durham. He graduated in Modern History at King’s College, University of Cambridge, before taking his M.Litt and Ph.D in Political Science at the University of St. Andrews. Before joining Durham he was an Assistant Professor at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates, first on the Abu Dhabi campus, then in Dubai. Mr. Davidson is also a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy and in 2009 was a Visiting Associate Professor at Kyoto University, Japan. He is a United Nations Alliance of Civilizations expert on the politics and development of the Gulf monarchies. His work has also been referred to by the UN’s High Commissioner on Refugees. Mr. Davidson has appeared on most major television and radio news bulletins, including the BBC, CNN, Sky, ABC, Al-Jazeera, Japan’s NHK, Bloomberg, ITV, Iran’s Press TV, Reuters TV, and NPR. His opinion editorials have appeared in The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, Foreign Policy, the New Statesman, OpenDemocracy, and the Index on Censorship.