Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Executive Dean (Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences)

Professor Gareth Stansfield is Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Gareth is Professor of Middle East Politics and is an internationally recognized scholar on the politics of the region, focusing particularly upon conflict causation and management, post-conflict rehabilitation, and the security dynamics of the countries of the Gulf. He has extensive fieldwork experience in a range of countries, and especially Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, and also Syria and Afghanistan.

He was previously the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the College of Social Sciences and International Studies and the Director of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. Since 2014, he has been a Civilian Deployable Expert attached to the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office’s (FCDO) Office for Conflict Stabilisation, and Mediation (OCSM) and has been a Senior Adviser to the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General to Iraq, a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, and an Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House). He is currently a Senior Fellow of the Changing Character of Warfare Programme at the University of Oxford, a Fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and a Fellow of the Council on Geostrategy.

Gareth was awarded an OBE in the New Years Honours 2024 for services to UK interests in Iraq.