May Darwich is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Birmingham, with specialization in the Middle East ad International Relations of the Global South. Her research attempts is situated at the intersection of International Relations Theory and Global IR, and examine how the Middle East — its transregional entanglements with the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa — function as a site of theory production, rather than merely an empirical domain.

Her work focuses on identity politics, threat perception and alliance politics, foreign policy behaviour, infrastructural power, and explores how material and ideational dynamics shape international behaviour in the Global South. She is author of Threats and Alliances in the Middle East: Saudi and Syrian Policies in a Turbulent Region (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and co-editor of the forthcoming textbook International Relations of the Middle East: Theories and Case Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2026). She was PI of the Carnegie-funded project Port Infrastructures, International Politics, and Everyday Life: From the Arabian Gulf to the Horn of Africa.

Her research has appeared in leading international journals, namely International Studies Review, Foreign Policy Analysis, International Studies Perspectives, Religion and Politics, Journal of Global Security Studies, Democratization, Mediterranean Politics, Global Discourse. My research has been supported by funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, British Academy, Leverhulme, the Arab Political Science Association, and Open Society Foundation.

Prior to the University of Birmingham, she was Assistant Professor at Durham University (2016-2019) and a Research Fellow at GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies (2014-2015). She holds a PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Edinburgh (2015), an MA in International Politics from SciencePo Bordeaux (2010), and a BA in Political Science from Cairo University (2009). 

May Darwich is actively engaged in advancing inclusive knowledge production and Global IR scholarship. She served on the Steering Committee on the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS), a collaborative network designed to enhance the broader field of Middle East political science. She serves on the Steering Committee of the APSA MENA Workshops, an annual fellowship opportunity for PhD students and early-career political science faculty from the Arab MENA region. She is member of the Committee on Status of Engagement with the Global South of the International Studies Association. Between 2019-2020, she was Director of the Arab Political Science Network (APSN), a scholarly collaborative initiative that seeks to support, enhance and increase scholars’ research and teaching outputs in the study of political science, and its sub and related fields in the Arab world. She also served as Trustee of the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL), a British Academy Institute aimed at enhancing and supporting research in the Levant (2018- 2020). She is co-editor of the series ‘Identities and Geopolitics in the Middle East’ at Manchester University Press.