Dr Francesco Saverio Leopardi is a Research Fellow at the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Dr. Leopardi is currently conducting a research project covering Algerian-Chinese economic relations and the emergence of China as fundamental trading partner for Middle Eastern and North African states. He also teaches International Relations of the Middle East at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna. In Bologna Dr. Leopardi has contributed as Research Fellow to a larger research project named 'The Making of the Washington Consensus. International Assets, Debt and Power (1979-1991)'. The goal of the project was to shed light on the politics of negotiations on sovereign debts in the Global South and reassess the relations between debtor countries and their creditors. In particular, he focused on the case of Algeria and its debt crisis (1989-1997) and his research was based on both English and Arabic primary sources retrieved from creditors and debtors' archives. He obtained his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in November 2017 with a thesis on the decline of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Provides an insightful and innovative analysis of the PFLP's decline

Presents a historical account of the PFLP's marginalization process

Shows analysis solidly based on a wide range of primary sources published across more than twenty years

Elaborates concepts, such as the 'opposition-integration dilemma' and policy fluctuation, that can be applied to the study of opposition factions elsewhere