Mahdi Zaidan is a research officer with the Knowledge for Development and Diplomacy (K4DD) program. He is also a doctoral researcher at King’s College London’s Department of Geography, focusing on the political economy and ecology of post-oil infrastructure in the Middle East. Mahdi previously held the William Wyse studentship as an MPhil student in Social Anthropology at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, where he explored the history and politics of urban development and infrastructure in post-war Lebanon. Additionally, he received a full-ride scholarship for his MA at Georgetown University’s Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies.

Before joining IDS, Mahdi worked on various development and humanitarian programs in the Levant and the Gulf, working with organisations such as Search for Common Ground, HIVOS, and the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre. He is currently a trustee and co-founder of the Accountability Archive, a crowdsourced initiative dedicated to collecting statements that call for and endorse the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the defamation of their supporters.