Dr Antonella Acinapura

Antonella Acinapura is a Sasakawa Peace Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Middle East Centre, the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA). She holds a Ph.D. in Politics and International Relations from Queen’s University Belfast (2022), a MA in Middle Eastern Studies from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and a BA in Oriental Studies from Sapienza University of Rome. Before joining Oxford, she thought undergraduate and postgraduate courses about contemporary Middle Eastern politics and terrorism at the University of Salford and Queen’s University of Belfast.

Her current research project adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines knowledge from three sub-fields of research – Social Movement Theory, Critical Terrorism Studies, and research on Militant Islamism – to examine the relation between framing and tactics. Specifically, by focusing on the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, it examines the role of shared perceptions, collective identities and emotions in influencing Islamist armed groups to shift between and within violent and non-violent repertories of action during ongoing conflicts.