Dr. Marianna Charountaki -  is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Lincoln (School of Social and Political Sciences). She has acted as Director of the Kurdistan International Studies Unit (2016-2019) at the University of Leicester. She is a BRISMES trustee and convener of the BISA Foreign Policy Working Group. She is Research Fellow at Soran University (Erbil, Iraq) and trustee of the Greek Council for IR. She has worked as consultant at the Iraqi Embassy in Athens (Greece, 2011-2012). Marianna has been researching the Middle Eastern region, in light of IR discipline, but also through extensive field work research (2007 to present). Her research lies at the intersection of IR theories, foreign policy analysis and area studies with an emphasis on the interplay between state and non-state entities. She is the author of the books The Kurds and US Foreign Policy: International Relations in the Middle East since 1945, (Routledge, 2011) and Iran and Turkey: International and Regional Engagement in the Middle East (I.B. Tauris,2018). She has published articles in Harvard International Review, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Third World Quarterly, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and others.