Nahrain Bet Younadam

Nahrain Bet Younadam is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. From 2022-2024, Nahrain was the University of Arizona’s Inaugural Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Government and Public Policy. She completed her PhD in political science from the University of California, Davis, in June 2022 where she specialized in comparative politics and international relations with a focus on non-violent social movements, ethnic politics, and human rights. Nahrain is a Peace Scholar alum at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and an Alumni Fellow in the American Political Science Association's Middle East and North Africa (APSA MENA) section.

Nahrain’s research explores human rights issues, focusing on ethnic minority representation, marginalization, and mobilization. Funded by the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Russell J. Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational Foundation, Nahrain’s three-article dissertation examined consequences of autonomy arrangements on ethnic minorities in federal systems. Her research contributes novel empirical and theoretical insights into the complex and dynamic ways territorial arrangements in divided societies increase access to power for regionally-dominant ethnic minorities while simultaneously posing political challenges for non-dominant ethnic minorities in semi-autonomous regional structures. She has completed multiple rounds of fieldwork research in Northern Iraq, where she explored grievances by ethnic minorities in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and developed a new dataset on protest movements by Assyrians in Iraq between 2005-2018. 

Nahrain’s projects are currently under review at multiple scholarly journals, including a Revise & Resubmit decision at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus (PNAS Nexus).