Eric Lob is a nonresident scholar in the Carnegie Middle East Program and an associate professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University. His research focuses on the intersection of politics and development in Middle East. It specifically explores how state and non-state actors in the region instrumentalize development as a soft power mechanism to further their political interests both domestically and internationally.

Lob is the author of Iran’s Reconstruction Jihad: Rural Development and Regime Consolidation after 1979 (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Based on interviews and archival research in Iran, the book examines how the Islamic Republic mobilized activists and promoted development in the countryside to consolidate power against its internal and external opponents. The project is based on his 2013 dissertation at Princeton University that won the Foundation for Iranian Studies annual award for best dissertation and honorable mention for the Association for Iranian Studies biannual Mashayekhi Dissertation Award.

Lob’s articles have appeared in The International Journal of Middle East Studies, Iranian Studies, Middle East Critique, The Middle East Journal, The Muslim World, Third World Quarterly, and others. He has provided commentary on Iran and the Middle East to some of the leading domestic and international media outlets. Lob previously served as a nonresident scholar with the Middle East Institute’s Iran Program and as a board of trustees member of the American Institute of Iranian Studies. 

Lob currently teaches courses on comparative politics and international relations of the Middle East, political violence and revolution, and conflict and development. Before joining the faculty at Florida International University, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. Between 2009 and 2011, Lob conducted fieldwork and studied Persian in Iran. He also studied Arabic at Georgetown and Damascus Universities between 2005 and 2007. In 2005, Lob earned an MA in Middle East and Strategic Studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.