School of Social & Political Sciences

We're delighted to welcome two new lecturers to our Politics & International Relations subject. 

Maha Rafi Atal has joined as Lecturer in Global Economy. She researches the political power of corporations, with current projects on historical company rulers, contemporary corporate social responsibility, the regulation of digital platforms and the corporate accountability under international law. Prior to coming to Glasgow, Maha was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Copenhagen Business School, where she is an investigator on the Danish research council-supported “Commodifying Compassion” project, a study of partnerships in which businesses donate proceeds from product sales to charitable causes. She received her PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge, investigating corporate social responsibility as a governance regime in India, Kenya and South Africa, and holds degrees from Brown University and Columbia University in the United States. In addition to her academic career, Maha is an award-winning journalist and policy analyst, with work published in Forbes, BusinessWeek, The Guardian, the New Statesman and the Washington Post, among others. She tweets frequently at @MahaRafiAtal.

Gerasimos Tsourapas has joined the School as a Senior Lecturer in International Relations. Previously, he was a Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Birmingham and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University (2019–20). His work focuses on the politics of migrants, refugees, and diasporas in the Middle East and the broader Global South. Gerasimos has published two monographs with Cambridge University Press (The Politics of Migration in Modern Egypt: Strategies for Regime Survival in Autocracies - 2019) and Manchester University Press (Migration Diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa: Power, Mobility, and the State - 2021). He is currently leading on two research projects: “The Rise of Transnational Authoritarianism in the Middle East” (Council for British Research in the Levant Pilot Grant; 2020–22), and “Non-State Actors and Migration Diplomacy in the Middle East” (ESRC IAA Grant; 2020–21).

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First published: 9 June 2021