Marc Jones

I received my BA in Journalism, Film and Broadcasting from Cardiff University in 2006, and a CASAW-funded MSc in Arab World Studies from the University of Durham in 2010.  I recently completed my PhD (funded by the AHRC/ESRC) in 2016 at Durham, where I wrote an interdisciplinary thesis on the history of political repression in Bahrain.  Driven by issues of social justice and a specific area interest in the Gulf, my research spans a number of topics, from de-democratization and revolutionary cultural production, to policing, digital authoritarianism and human rights.  I am particularly interested in strategies of control that affect people’s life chances in the service of elite power maintenance.  Prior to joining Exeter I won a Teach at Tuebingen award, and wrote and delivered an MA module in Gulf Politics at Tuebingen University’s Institute for Political Science. I spent much of my childhood in Bahrain, and have also lived elsewhere in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria.

At Exeter, my research will mainly be focused on Bahraini court records from the first half of the 20th century, which I will be using to analyse the impact the cadastral survey had on land rights in the country.  In addition to this, I am revisiting the British-led reforms of the 1920s, and looking at power dynamics in Bahrain post-Independence, with particular attention paid to the changing nature of foreign influence.  I will also be using big data techniques to examine strategies of sectarian hate speech on social media in the Gulf region.