Juan Piñón del Río is a PhD Candidate in Contemporary Arab and Islamic Studies at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), Spain. He is a recipient of the Fundación Oriol-Urquijo doctoral fellowship and has been awarded a Fulbright Predoctoral Research Fellowship for his research stay at GWU/IMES. He holds a dual BA in International Relations and Economics from Rey Juan Carlos University and an MA in Contemporary Arab and Islamic Studies from UAM. He has also served as a lecturer in International Relations and Public International Law at Rey Juan Carlos University.
His research interests include Gulf politics, sectarianization, identity formation, state-building, political Islam, and the relationship between historical legacies and contemporary governance in the Middle East. More specifically, his dissertation examines the process of sectarianization in Bahrain from 1782 to the present from a critical perspective. His most recent publication is the Gulf International Forum report The Making of Sectarian Conflict in Yemen: Domestic and Regional Drivers (1970–2025), which examines how religious identities have become politically salient through domestic and regional processes.
His current research project examines why sectarian identities have acquired such political salience in Bahrain. By “sectarianization,” he refers to the historical and political process through which religious difference becomes politically meaningful, that is, how sectarian belonging comes to shape narratives of loyalty, exclusion, citizenship, authority, and access to power, rather than being treated as fixed or inevitable. During his stay at GWU/IMES, he intends to focus more specifically on the period from 1900 to the present, examining how sectarian dynamics have been shaped by state formation, colonial reform, governance, and political survival.
He is particularly interested in the period of British reformism in the early twentieth century, roughly 1900–1930, and in how the Al Khalifa ruling family’s strategies of political survival since independence may have influenced sectarian relations and identity formation over time.