Mark C. Thompson is a senior associate fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He was an assistant professor of Middle East studies at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where he taught undergraduate courses in international relations and globalization from 2012-19. Thompson has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia since 2001 for diverse institutions, such as Saudi Arabian Airlines, the Saudi National Guard, and Prince Sultan University. He is the author of Being Young, Male and Saudi: Identity and Politics in a Globalized Kingdom (Cambridge University Press 2019). Thompson is co-editor of Policy-Making in the GCC: State, Citizens and Institutions (I.B. Tauris 2017) with Neil Quilliam, and he has contributed chapters on Saudi Arabia to several edited books, including Public Brainpower: Civil Society and Resource Management (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). Thompson holds a PhD from the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.