Melania Brito Clavijo

Melania is a Member of the Forum of the Arab and Muslim World (FIMAM) Board since 2024. She is a pre-doctoral researcher affiliated with the ISOR Sociology of Religion group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, within the doctoral program in Sociology, and in the International Relations and History program at Leiden University, under a dual PhD program. She also collaborates with the TRANSMENA research group (UAB), which focuses on the study of transnational elites and actors in the MENA region.

Her research lies at the intersection of religion and foreign policy, with a special focus on official Islam as a technology of power and ideological resource for the legitimization of authoritarian regimes in the MENA region. Her thesis analyzes the deployment of Moroccan religious diplomacy in West Africa, understood as a strategy of external projection that articulates narratives of “spiritual security” and shared Islamic heritage to reinforce Morocco's regional leadership.

She has worked as a research project officer at the European Institute for the Mediterranean at the H2020 CONNEKT project, on factors of radicalization in the MENA region and the Balkans. Other areas of research that interest her include (de)radicalization processes, the reintegration of foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs), hate speech in general and towards Muslim communities, and sacred music festivals as a tool for cultural and religious diplomacy, among others. She holds a master's degree in Contemporary Arab and Islamic Studies from the autonomous University of Madrid and another in International Relations from the Barcelona Institute of International Studies.