About

There's a version of this region that exists almost entirely in Western coverage — reactive, unstable, legible only in crisis. It shows up in the framing of stories that treat every political development as either a threat or a reform, with little patience for the distance between those two things. It took me years to understand that the gap between that version and what's actually happening is itself the story.

My background is in energy and economics. I spent a long time writing analysis for clients who needed to understand markets they were entering or money they were moving. That work is more useful for journalism than it might seem. It teaches you that the financial structure of a thing usually explains the political surface of it, that the funding mechanism of an initiative tells you more about its intent than any official statement, and that most announcements are better understood as signals than as news.

I've been covering the Gulf and the broader Middle East for over a decade. That's long enough to have developed strong skepticism for several types of stories: the reform narrative that always seems to be perpetually arriving, the security story that loses interest the moment the immediate tension fades, the economic story that treats foreign investment numbers as self-explanatory. I try to write about what those stories leave out.

I'm based in Nicosia. It's not an obvious choice for this beat, but it works. I've lived in several cities in the region and keep up with all of them.