Research interests
Middle East politics, jihadism, sectarianism, data analysis, social media analysis, Italian foreign policy
Overview
My research area is politics of the MENA region, with a focus on Egypt, Libya and, to a lesser extent, Syria, Turkey and Iraq. I am mostly interested in the analysis of current political events and public opinion dynamics. In my research, I combine various approaches including social media analysis, ideology studies, and foreign policy analysis. Topics I have been working on include sectarianism, non-state actors, and the online communication strategy of the Islamic State.
Dissertation
My dissertation, titled Tweeting the Caliphate: The Ideology of IS in the Arabic-Speaking Twitter Sphere, offers an analysis of how the Arabic-speaking community on Twitter has discussed about the Islamic State from 2014 to 2017. The study is based on a database of over 32 million tweets in Arabic that contain references to IS and that stretches across a three-year period, starting from the rise of the Islamic State (in October 2014) to its military defeat in its unofficial capital of Raqqa (in October 2017). The first chapter presents the results of a sentiment analysis I conducted based on machine learning of the support for and opposition to IS, as well as a topic analysis of the most recurrent themes in the Arabic-Speaking Twitter-sphere debate on IS. In the second chapter, I offer a statistical analysis of the variables that make up my model for predicting support for the Islamic State. The third chapter zooms in on a subset of the overall database, which consists of Tweets on IS that use a sectarian terminology towards the Shīʿī, to analyse whether sectarianism is a factor in accounting for support for IS.