Dr Jessie Moritz

Dr Jessie Moritz holds a PhD from the Australian National University, with her dissertation receiving the international 2017 Dissertation Prize from the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies. Her research focuses on the political economy of energy in the Arabian Peninsula, with a particular focus on state-society relations, diversification strategies, and renewable energy transitions.

At the ANU, she co-convenes the Security research cluster at the Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions. Internationally, she serves as a Board-Member at-large of the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies.

Jessie previously held a postdoctoral research fellowship with the Transregional Institute at Princeton University, where she focused on economic reform programs in the GCC and lectured on political and economic development of the Middle East. She has also held a number of visiting fellow positions in the Gulf and UK, including the King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter and the Gulf Studies Program at Qatar University.

At  the ANU, Jessie teaches in the areas of Middle East political economy, development and Gulf security & international relations, and supervises PhD, Masters, and Honours candidates on topics related to Gulf political economy and state-society relations. Her research has recently been published in International Affairs, the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the Journal of Arabian Studies, and the Routledge Handbook for Persian Gulf Politics. Her current book project leverages in-depth fieldwork across Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia to examine the bottom-up micropolitics of rentierism.

PhD in Political Economy of the Middle East

Gulf and Arabian Peninsula political economy, comparative politics, state-society relations, political economy of development. Current research on renewable energy transitions and climate change policies in the Gulf oil and gas-rich states. Particular country interests in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, UAE, Iraq, and Yemen.