Jonas Bergan Draege

Jonas Bergan Draege is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Oslo New University College (ONH). 

His research focuses on issues concerning authoritarian politics and democratization, with a particular focus on the Middle East. Before he joined ONH in 2020, Jonas worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University for three years. 
 
Jonas holds a PhD from the European University Institute. His PhD project looked at the interactions between protest movements and opposition parties in contemporary Turkey. He has worked extensively on Syrian politics, and he has acted as an adviser for international mediation organizations working on the Syria conflict. 

Jonas currently also works as an international elections observer for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), and a senior lecturer for the University of Oslo’s International Summer School. His working languages are English, Norwegian, Arabic, Turkish, and Italian.
 

Background 

• Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University (2017-2020)
• PhD in Political Science, European University Institute (2017)
• MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford (2013)
• BA, Arabic, Middle Eastern Studies, and Psychology, University of Oslo (2010)

Selected publications

• Hintz, Lisel, and Jonas Bergan Draege. “Film-Making the Nation Great Again: Audio-visualizing History in the Authoritarian Toolkit.” Perspectives on Politics (2025): 1–33.
• Draege, Jonas Bergan. “Narrow Responses to Social Movements: Evidence from Turkey’s Gezi Protests.” Representation 59.4 (2023): 745–761.
• Dennison, James, and Jonas Draege. “The dynamics of electoral politics after the Arab Spring: evidence from Tunisia.” The Journal of North African Studies 26.4 (2021): 756–780.
• Draege, Jonas Bergan. “Parliamentary Discussions in Authoritarian Contexts: Introducing a Dataset on Party Responses to Turkey’s Gezi Protests.” Mediterranean Politics (2021): 1–15.
• Draege, Jonas Bergan, and James Dennison. “Making sense of Italy’s constitutional referendum.” Mediterranean Politics 23.3 (2018): 403–409.
• Draege, Jonas Bergan, Daniela Chironi, and Donatella Della Porta. “Social movements within organizations: occupy parties in Italy and Turkey.” South European Society and Politics 22.2 (2017): 139–156.
• Draege, Jonas Bergan. “The formation of Syrian opposition coalitions as two-level games.” The Middle East Journal 70.2 (2016): 189–210.

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