Malika Bouziane, Ph.D. Candidate

Research Associate & Senior Project Manager, MENA

​Malika Bouziane, Ph.D. candidate at the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Politics at Freie Universität Berlin and currently the Senior Project Manager in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) of the Berghof Foundation.
​
Her current research focuses on participation in parliamentary and municipal elections in Jordan with a specific focus on the impact of informal participatory politics on local governance structures and discursive perceptions of state. Her focus is on rural areas in the south of Jordan. Since 2008, she has been investigating decentralization in Jordan, empirically focusing on the impact of decentralization on participation and local governance institutions. Since 2011, she has been researching social unrest and protests in Jordan. Conceptually Bouziane is interested in the concepts of neo-institutionalism, informality, power, and authority, as well as the transformation of state-society relations and unconventional forms of participation. Malika Bouziane has several publications amongst them the edited volume “Local Politics and Contemporary Transformations in the Arab World: Governance Beyond the Center” (together with Cilja Harders and Anja Hoffmann).

In her position as a Senior Project Manager at the Berghof Foundation, Malika Bouziane working on the National and Political dialogue is engaged with the phenomena of (violent) extremism in Jordan.

Malika received her BA in Business Administration, Language Teaching Methodology, and Arabic Studies and a Master of Arts in European Culture and Economy from the Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany). Currently, she is finishing her PhD dissertation, analyzing how informality shapes state-society relations and contributes to the stability of the authoritarian regime in Jordan.