Who’s who in the Middle East? The Houthis

Alexander Weissenburger

Alexander Weissenburger is associated researcher at the Austrian Academy of Science's Institute for Social Anthropology. His PhD thesis investigates the ideology of the Yemeni Huthi movement.

In 2024, the Defence Academy of the Austrian Armed Forces Austrian published the edited volume Yemen at a crossroads – What remains of Arabia Felix?, co-edited by Weissenburger.

Weissenburger holds an MLitt in Middle East, Caucasus and Central Asian Security Studies from the University of St Andrews and an MA in Islamic Studies from the University of Vienna where he taught Middle Eastern and Arabic grammar.

Eirik Hovden

Eirik Hovden is a scholar of Yemeni and Zaydi history. He has worked on comparative medieval history at the Austrian Academic of Sciences as well as on traditional Zaydi Islamic law of governance at UiB.

Hovden is currently leading a TMS starting grant about the development and change in Islamic law seen through the concepts of canonization and codification, located at the Department of Foreign Languages and Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion at UiB.

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Maria-Louise Clausen

Maria-Louise Clausen is a Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, fellow in the Sectarianism, Proxies & De-sectarianisation project and PI on the Violent Peacemakers project (2022-2025) funded by the Danish Independent Research Fund.

Her work centers on the relationship between state and non-state actors, state-building, and how global inequalities impact the justifications and implications of international intervention with a geographic focus on Iraq and Yemen. She has published on these issues in journals such as Third World Quarterly, Public Administration and Development, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Small Wars and Insurgencies, as well as International Affairs.

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Pelle Valentin Olsen

Pelle Valentin Olsen is a cultural, social, and transnational historian of the modern Middle East. His research and teaching focus on the history of leisure, labor, gender, sexuality, popular culture, and cultural production.

He focusses specifically on Iraq, but his work simultaneously explores transregional and transnational connections, highlighting everyday perspectives and voices often left out by traditional political and state-centered histories.

He received his PhD with honors from the University of Chicago in 2020. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Roskilde University in Denmark, where he worked on the ‘Entangled Histories of Palestine and the Global New Left’ project.

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