Simon Mabon is a lecturer in international relations at the University of Lancaster. He is the author of Saudi Arabia and Iran: Soft Power Rivalry in the Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2013), Hizballah: From Islamic Resistance to Government (Praeger, 2014, with Gordon Clubb and James Worrall) and British Foreign Policy (Routledge, 2015, with Mark Garnett). He is Director of the Richardson Institute and a research associate with the Foreign Policy Centre.