Sherin Gharib is a researcher at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs and a lecturer at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Her fields of research are political transformation processes, Islamist movements, state and non-state actors as well as the EU foreign and security policy towards the Middle East. Her regional focus lies on the MENA-region. She is currently working on a project dealing with innovation and technologies in Egypt and Algeria. In addition, she was working on the research project “The normative impact of EU foreign and security policy in the Middle East”, where the changes and continuities in the EU’s relations with post-Arab Spring societies (Egypt and Tunisia in particular) were analysed.