Dr. Emma Soubrier is Director of the PRISME initiative. She is also an Associate Researcher with the Institute for Peace and Development at the Université Côte d’Azur’s LADIE International and European Law Department (Nice, France) and an Associated Researcher with the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (Boston, USA). Over the past ten years, her research has focused on the security strategies and foreign policies of the Gulf countries as well as the political economy of the global arms trade. Emma is an expert with the Forum on Arms Trade and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington (AGSIW). Her work promotes a renewed approach to security in the Middle East that no longer focuses merely on political and military aspects but includes a broader look at people-centered dimensions of security (human security, particularly societal security and environmental security).
Emma has many publications in French and English on Gulf security issues, including “Gulf Security in a Multipolar World: Power Competition, Diversified Cooperation” and “Redefining Gulf Security Begins by Including the Human Dimension” (AGSIW 2020). Her forthcoming book, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates: Diverging Paths to Regional and Global Power (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2023), is based on her PhD thesis, which received a Dissertation Award from the Institute for Higher National Defense Studies (France) in 2018. As part of the World Peace Foundation research team for the project, “Defense Industries, Foreign Policy and Armed Conflict,” funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, she authored the report “Weaponized storytelling à la française: Demystifying France’s narratives around its arms export policies” in April 2022.
Emma was previously a professorial lecturer and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Middle East Studies at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs on two occasions, a visiting scholar at AGSIW for two years, and a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre Michel de l’Hospital, Université Clermont Auvergne (France). She worked for three and a half years at the French Ministry of Defense and for three years at Airbus Defence and Space. She received her PhD in political science from the Université Clermont Auvergne in 2017 and holds an MA in international relations from Sorbonne University (Paris, France).
