Mikael Hiberg Naghizadeh

Mikael Hiberg Naghizadeh is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the International Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. His research focuses on civil war and other forms of collective political violence, particularly in the Horn of Africa.

He is currently developing a comprehensive dataset on violence against civilians during the Tigray War (2020–2022) primarily using remote sensing technologies such as satellite data. This for the purpose of understanding micro-level variance in the occurrence of atrocities against civilians.  

His book project, Islamist Civil Wars: Tragedies of Modernity, seeks to explain why militant Islamism has become pervasive as a revolutionary ideology in recent decades by tracing the trajectories of both Islamist and non-Islamist rebel groups, and the conditions which produced them. It challenges notions that militant Islamist groups are an inevitable result of state collapse, putting forth that they are a response response to specific social dislocations and grievances where only religiously oriented movements are able to offer a credible vision for a different social order.

Mikael holds a D.Phil. in International Relations from the University of Oxford. He also holds an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford and an M.Sc. from London School of Economics and Political Science in International Relations, and a bachelor’s in political science from the University of Oslo. He also has experience working with conflict analysis and atrocity detection outside of academia.

For a list of publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=OJwZ9Y4AAAAJ&hl=en