Visiting scholar Erin Snider has recently joined IMES. Dr. Snider is a scholar of democracy assistance, foreign aid, and the international political economy of development with more than twenty years of research and policy experience. She most recently served as a senior advisor to USAID’s Democracy Openings and Democratic Backsliding Project and previously contributed to the U.S. Department of State’s Democracy Assistance in Transition Working Group. She was also a professor at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service and has held fellowships at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and as a Carnegie Fellow at New America. Earlier in her career, she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar and Fulbright Fellow in Egypt.

Dr. Snider’s research examines how democracy assistance and U.S. foreign policy shape political and economic outcomes in authoritarian settings, particularly in the Middle East. Her first book, Marketing Democracy: The Political Economy of Democracy Assistance in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2022), draws on extensive fieldwork to show how power relations and dominant ideas embedded in aid programs are negotiated, adapted, and contested—revealing why decades of democracy promotion have failed to produce meaningful political change. Her current projects explore the politics of transitional aid and the political economy of renewable energy transitions in the Middle East.

This year at GWU, Dr. Snider will advance her project “Authoritarian Currents: Energy Democracy and the Political Economy of Renewable Energy in Egypt,” which examines how authoritarian regimes shape the trajectory of renewable energy transitions. While renewable energy is often associated with decentralization and democratization, in Egypt the state has strategically used solar and wind power to reinforce political control. Egypt initially embraced private solar investment in response to an energy crisis and international financial pressure, only to reverse course by 2020—imposing tariffs, regulatory hurdles, and pricing mechanisms that undercut private sector participation. In the project, she traces how state actors selectively liberalized and then re-centralized the solar sector, with consequences not only for energy access and sustainability, but also for private capital, foreign donors, and everyday energy users. The project argues that Egypt’s renewable energy strategy has been shaped less by environmental priorities than by the regime’s need to manage political risk, maintain economic control, and safeguard the centrality of the military-industrial elite.

Alongside this, Dr. Snider will work on her book manuscript, “Containing Change: The Politics of Transitional Aid in the Middle East,” which analyzes how donors responded to the post-2011 democratic openings in Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. Drawing on fieldwork, the book argues that transitional aid functioned less as a driver of reform than as a tool for managing uncertainty and stabilizing regimes. This project speaks to broader debates on development finance, democratization, and authoritarian resilience.