Prof. Dr. Raffaella A. Del Sarto

European University Institute
International Relations and Middle East Studies

External Senior Fellow
April 2024

Last Update: 08.11.2024

Curriculum Vitae

Raffaella A. Del Sarto is currently a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI), Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. She is the Incoming Joint Chair in Mediterranean Studies at the EUI, Department of Social and Political Sciences and Robert Schuman Centre. She was previously Associate Professor of Middle East Studies and Academic Director of the Master of Arts in International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), SAIS Europe campus.

Her research interests and areas of expertise include the international relations of the Middle East and North Africa—particularly in relation to Europe; the nexus between domestic and foreign policies; questions of regional order(s), borders, and interdependence in the Middle East; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and Israel’s foreign and domestic policies.

Before joining Johns Hopkins SAIS Europe, she was a part-time professor at the EUI’s Robert Schuman Centre where she directed the BORDERLANDS research project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Prior to this she was a Pears Fellow at the University of Oxford, St Antony’s College, and prior to this, a Marie Curie Fellow and a Jean Monnet Fellow at the EUI. She received her PhD (summa cum laude) in International Relations from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her MA in Political Sciences from the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany. In the late 1990s, during the Oslo process, she worked as a project manager with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in Jerusalem, managing a German government fund in support of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

She is fluent in English, German, French, Italian, and Hebrew, and she knows some Arabic and some Spanish.

Selected Publications

Del Sarto, Raffaella A. and Eduard Soler i Lecha (2024). ‘Regionalism and Alliances in the Middle East, 2011-2021: From a “Flash in the Pan” of Regional Cooperation to Liquid Alliances’, Geopolitics, published online 5 January, DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2023.2268542
Del Sarto, Raffaella A. and Menachem Klein (2023). ‘Oslo: Three Decades Later‘, Israel Studies Revies 38(2): 1-11.
Del Sarto, Raffaella A. (2021). Borderlands: Europe and the Mediterranean Middle East. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Del Sarto, Raffaella A. (2021). ‘Sectarian Securitization in the Middle East and the Case of Israel’, International Affairs 97(3): 759-778, doi: 10.1093/ia/iiab011
Del Sarto, Raffaella A. (2017). Israel under Siege: The Politics of Insecurity and the Rise of the Israeli Neo-Revisionist Right. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

FRIAS Project

The Mediterranean Middle East between global order and (g)local dilemmas

More than a decade after the start of the Arab uprisings, a number of pressing problems and persistent dilemmas mark the Mediterranean Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Europe’s ‘southern neighbourhood’. These include civil wars and political fragility, a general upgrade of authoritarianism, crony capitalism, rising inequalities, high youth unemployment, the persistence of exclusionary ethno-religious politics, migration and refugee flows, and environmental degradation. Yet, the net decline in political rights and civil liberties, the rise of populism, rising inequalities within and among states, the challenge of migration and the tragedies of refugees, not to mention environmental degradation and climate change, are pressing problems at the global level, too. These challenges also seem to be interconnected and mutually reinforcing.

This research proposes to analyse the major problems in the MENA region from a systemic perspective. It will investigate whether, and to what extent, the predicaments in the MENA region are a local manifestation of our political and socio-economic global order. In other words, is there a relationship of correlation or causality between the global order and specific development models within this order on the one hand, and the precarious political and economic conditions in most MENA states on the other? And conversely, to what extent are developments in the MENA region impacting the global order? The project will thus also consider the extent to which specific policy choices of MENA governments contributed to a ‘distorted’ outcome, primarily at the local level, but possibly at the global level as well.