Sanam Vakil

Director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House, Vakil is a British-Iranian political scientist who has published extensively on Iranian domestic politics, Gulf security and the JCPOA nuclear negotiations. She appears regularly on BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera and briefs parliamentary committees.

Sanam Vakil has been the most prominent independent analytical voice on Iran's succession crisis, providing real-time assessments from the earliest hours of the conflict. She warned that the Supreme Leader's seat could remain empty for days despite Iran's Foreign Minister claiming a successor would be named imminently. Her analysis that Pezeshkian's contradictory orders reflected a fractured command chain proved prescient.

Her institutional position at Chatham House gives her analysis additional weight: the think tank's published challenge to the UK's defensive/offensive base access distinction drew on the same analytical framework. She has consistently argued that the IRGC, not the civilian government, controls Iran's wartime decision-making, a position now widely accepted.