Dr. Paola Rivetti is a lecturer at the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University. Her research interests focus on the dynamic of authoritarian resilience and democratization in the Middle East from a comparative perspective; on Iranian domestic politics, with particular attention to the politics of activism and dissent under authoritarian rule; and on diaspora politics and transnational activism, and their impact on the Iranian regime. She completed a PhD in Social Sciences in 2010 (University of Siena, Italy) and is involved in an international research project funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation (2012-2013) on the trajectory of political Islam in five MENA countries. She is also Editor-at-large of the e-journal New Middle Eastern Studies. She lectured in Geopolitics between 2009 and 2011 at the Catholic University of Milan and at the Normandy Business School at Le Havre, France. Dr. Rivetti has carried out extensive fieldwork in Iran between 2005 and 2008, where she was a research fellow at the Tehran-based French Institute of Persian Studies in 2007 and 2008. Between 2009 and 2012, she also carried out fieldwork in Turkey where she worked with Iranian asylum-seekers and political refugees. She published in Democratization, Middle Eastern Studies, Mediterranean Politics, Alternatives: Global Local Political and the Chaillot Paper Series. She also co-edited Civil Society Effect. Practice and rhetoric in Iran, Lebanon, Egypt and Morocco (2010, in Italian).