About
60
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Introduction
My research is about the dilemmas of peace, governance and democratization in post-conflict societies, the politics of refuge and migration in conflict-affected areas, and the multilateral policies of actors such as the European Union, the United Nations & the Arab League in conflict and cooperation. I am interested in teaching, research and policy approaches accounting for the political agency of states and societies, perceived to be on the margins of power in the international system.
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Position
- Associate Professor
Description
- I am an Associate Professor of International Politics and Conflict at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. My research is about the dilemmas of peace, inclusive governance and democratization in post-conflict societies, and the politics of refuge and migration. Before joining Fletcher, I was an Associate Professor of Political Science at Aalborg University in its Copenhagen Campus (Denmark), and a visiting Professor as well as the Kuwait Chair at Sciences Po in Paris.
September 2020 - present
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Publications
Publications (60)
The Arab region has played an oversized role in hosting refugees. Yet a paucity of literature exists on how the region has contributed to shaping the international refugee regime.
This anthology presents the first comprehensive study of how Arab states interact with the international refugee regime. It offers a multidisciplinary perspective bringi...
Refugee-hosting geographies represent complex sites of encounter where power and knowledge intersect with territoriality. While they cannot be inherently ‘unusual’, they become so when they deviate from dominant discourses, categories and practices that seek to impose order and meaning within the global refugee regime. The introduction to the Speci...
How do semi-authoritarian regimes manage dissent and how does their protest management repertoire deter and spark contention? This paper looks at Lebanon’s post-war system as an instance of authoritarian rule that relies on various techniques of power, including political performances, to manage contention. Building on a dramaturgical approach, I f...
To what extent is power-sharing theory, used as one of the key conceptual frameworks for Lebanon’s political system, still relevant for charting a way forward amid the country’s cumulative crises? This article heeds the call to position research on Lebanon’s power-sharing in a pluralist research agenda that speaks to a wider knowledge base and to a...
The Arab region has played an oversized role in hosting refugees. Yet a paucity of literature exists on how the region has contributed to shaping the international refugee regime.
This open access anthology presents the first comprehensive study of how Arab states interact with the international refugee regime. It offers a multidisciplinary perspec...
The Arab region has played an oversized role in hosting refugees. Yet a paucity of literature exists on how the region has contributed to shaping the international refugee regime.
This open access anthology presents the first comprehensive study of how Arab states interact with the international refugee regime. It offers a multidisciplinary perspec...
This chapter draws on the example of refugee displacement in Lebanon to derive broader conceptions on how notions of national identity and otherness materialize, interlace, and collide in the Mediterranean. We argue that Lebanon’s political system has constructed the figure of the refugee as a disrupter to Lebanon’s national identity, framed in the...
How do power-sharing governing coalitions work in the context of politicized identities and external pressures? And how do they emerge, develop, and disintegrate when governing parties share power in the context of colliding agendas? Working on the premise that coalition governments may be messy constellations of power, rather than rational avenues...
How do consociations craft their asylum policy, and how do they deal with the rights of “others”? Research has started to explore the relationship between consociational governance and non-ethnic or non-sectarian social groups. Yet, we still know little about how consociations interact with refugee flight on the one hand, and with the ethics of ref...
How does governing work today? How does society (mis)handle pressing challenges such as armed violence, cultural difference, ecological degradation, economic restructuring, geopolitical shifts, global pandemics, migration flows, and technological change in ways that are democratic, effective, fair, peaceful, and sustainable? This book addresses thi...
How does governing work today? How does society (mis)handle pressing challenges such as armed violence, cultural difference, ecological degradation, economic restructuring, geopolitical shifts, global pandemics, migration flows, and technological change in ways that are democratic, effective, fair, peaceful, and sustainable? This book addresses thi...
While much literature has concentrated on the EU’s policy to return people from within its borders, this article seeks to understand how the EU cooperates with refugee-hosting states beyond its borders, in its ‘Southern Neighbourhood’, to uphold conditions for voluntary, safe and dignified returns. We build on the case of Lebanon, which hosts the h...
The EU has drawn on its migration policy in the Middle East and North Africa as a method of region-building set to reconfigure a broader EU Mediterranean Neighborhood. At the same time, EU migration policy as a region-building initiative has had contentious, albeit understudied, effects. We know little about either variation in states’ responses to...
This article sets out to contribute to the debate on how Arab refugee hosting states, generally regarded as norm recipients and recalcitrant implementers of refugee law, have sought to shape, localize, and reconfigure understandings and practices of asylum. More broadly, it also hints at how states draw on the question of asylum to craft “political...
Resisting Europe conceptualizes the foreign policies of Europe-defined as the European Union and its member states-toward the states in its immediate southern "neighborhood" as semi-imperial attempts to turn these states into Europe's southern buffer zone, or borderlands. In these hybrid spaces, different types of rules and practices coexist and ov...
As the world stands to watch a complete humanitarian tragedy unfold in Lebanon because of the recent Beirut explosion, the implications of this disaster will touch many lives for many years to come. One particularly vulnerable group is Lebanon’s refugee population.
How do host states with a refugee regime relying on a patchwork of competing and informal responses negotiate refugee return? Amid a stalemate, Lebanon has taken in more than one million Syrian refugees. As soon as conflict dynamics shifted in favour of the Syrian regime, politicians started calling for their repatriation. In this context, although...
El análisis de las prácticas de retorno en el Líbano revela los retos para un retorno voluntario, seguro y digno. A medida que el régimen de Asad recupera el control en la mayor parte de Siria, los refugiados se ven sometidos a una presión cada vez mayor para que regresen de los países vecinos, incluido el Líbano. Sin embargo, el análisis del compl...
كشف تحليلٌ لممارسات العودة في لبنان عن تحدِّياتٍ تتحدَّى العودة الطوعية الآمنة التي تُصَان فيها الكرامة.
Analysis of return practices in Lebanon reveal challenges to voluntary, safe and dignified return.
Which role do cities play in Arabic literature, culture, and society? How is urban space represented, negotiated and performed in premodern and modern texts? And how do new theories and methods, like those related to the “spatial turn” and “urban studies”, help us to “map the urban”?
The Call for Applications is addressed to outstanding junior sch...
The article looks at the legacy of consociationalism in Lebanon with the aim of illuminating some insights on the linkages between power-sharing and conflict resolution in the post-2011 Middle East. It highlights three core dilemmas or governance traps that have recurred in Lebanon’s political dynamic: the power-sharing formula’s proneness to deadl...
In the context of Syria’s displacement, supranational ‘migration governors’ in the Arab region have sought – in different forms and capacities – to devise initiatives for responsibility sharing and to reinforce the capacity of Syria’s Arab neighbours to deal with refugee inflows. While the case of Syria’s displacement has witnessed the proliferatio...
Editorial introdution for the special issue on "Migration and Transnational Governance."
This article provides a comparative analysis of two types of power-sharing: Lebanon's corporate version and Northern Ireland's relatively liberal arrangements. Our aim is to explore whether these power-sharing institutions augment or stymie gender and LGBTQ equality, while also illuminating the complex ways in which LGBTQ movements conceptualize po...
The article draws on the case of the Egyptian uprising between 25 January and 11 February 2011, and maps the transnational practices in which Egyptians in the United States engaged to sustain political ties with Egypt during this period and its direct aftermath. Tracking the involvement of US-based Egyptians through the lens of digital, civic, and...
The chapter draws on what W. J. T Mitchell (2012, p. 18) describes as the “temporality of contagion” between the Arab uprisings and the Occupy Movement. It makes a case for studying Arab immigrant activist networks as political subjects who can provide us with insights into how methods of contention diffuse across Arab and Occupy protest sites. It...
This article discusses how the Lebanese state has responded to displacement from Syria (2011–17), and how the resulting policy formulation processes and discourses have constructed the relationship between the hosting state and the refugee. It focuses especially on how this small state has negotiated its politics of reception and choice of policy t...
With the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the Sunni–Shiite divide came back to the fore in regional politics. In this context, sectarian identities have now acquired a security dimension, as actors have started framing each other as existential threats. This article aims to examine the process by which sectarian identities become security issues a...
The article explores the European Union’s (EU) conflict response to Lebanon in the wake of Syria’s war and its spillover effects. Seeking to boost the polity’s ‘resilience’, the EU has deployed resources and strategies to stabilize the country, enhance its social cohesion and promote ‘effective governance’. The EU has furthermore integrated Lebanon...
The migration-security nexus, already at the heart of EU policymaking before the 2011 Arab uprisings, became acute after the forced displacements from Syria and the deterrence measures introduced. The internalisation by broader publics of “security knowledge” regarding migration contributed to the securitisation move. However, the construction of m...
Although its dysfunctional governance patterns predate the recent wave of turmoil in the region, the war in Syria has unsettled Lebanon's precarious equilibrium.
This article examines Lebanon's political dynamics in the context of the 2011 Arab protest wave, and seeks to integrate events in the small republic within the broader literature written on the contagion effects of the uprisings. It argues that the uprisings' trajectories provide a
terrain to better understand Lebanon's politics of sectarianism and...
This article analyses the discourse of Arab transnational student associations at the University of California in Berkeley (UCB) on Arab democratization. It places focus on their narratives during the 2011 uprisings. Its findings, based on interviews and qualitative data, show that these student associations craft a discursive and broader conceptio...
Lebanon, one of the most highly politicized and divided societies in the Middle East, has watched the 2011 Arab Uprising nervously. Yet its own intricate legacy cross-communal compromise and the porous nature of its society have left it relatively unscathed. However, this could easily change.
This article examines the extent to which circular migration (CM) can be framed first as a useful migration typology and second as an efficient migration strategy in the MENA region and between the latter and the EU. After discussing the difficult conceptualisation of the circular migration model, it alludes to the inherent discrepancies between th...
Since the inception of the fragile nation-state in 1943, Lebanon has been faced with the constantly unstable predicament of being torn between Middle Eastern and Western orbits. After examining Lebanon's pre-war consociational democracy as well as the factors behind its collapse in 1975, Tamirace Fakhoury M'hlbacher analyses the post-war order (199...
The Lebanese consociational model from 1943 till 1975 has been considered as a successful case of consociational democracy. The formula of power-sharing based on the 1943 national pact and inspired from the 1926 constitution has allowed a deeply divided society composed of many religious communities to regulate its conflicts, and counteract to a ce...
By the middle of that decade, a fleeting wind of democracy blew in the Arab world. Political theories tackling the region’s “democratic resistance” were increasingly examined with a sceptical eye as competitive elections in Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, and Lebanon heralded a new Middle Eastern era. This array of political events prompted worldwide atten...
As the post-war system started acquiring heavy authoritarian features, consociational traits were simultaneously derailed. Power-sharing – whose maintenance and success, particularly in the Lebanese case – closely depends on elite cooperation, balanced inter-communal relations, and non-alignment, was adversely affected by intrinsic and extrinsic ag...
Since the beginning of the post-Ta’if order, points of authority were checked either by mild or intense democratic pressures. This cohabitation of authoritarian and democratic pressures has made up the identity and peculiarity of the Lebanese regime. It is worthy of notice that the magnitude of these democratic impetuses have varied in accordance t...
In his posthumous book, Lebanon: the Unachieved Dream, Samir Kassir writes of the dream of a Lebanon “enriched by its differences, freed from confessional and clannish constraints, a state devoted to its citizens […], a free and democratic society…” In this sense, he says: “It is not about resurrecting the old Lebanon […] but about reinventing anot...
It has always been rather assumed that socio-cultural homogeneity and majoritarian consensus are the main pillars upon which democracy could develop and consolidate its foundations. Yet, in the 1960s, political scientists strongly challenged these views and elaborated comparable types that helped explain stability in fragmented cultures. There was...
In 1989, the resurrection of the consociational buried pact with the Ta’if agreement proved that power-sharing could possibly reemerge despite its previous collapse. The political and institutional revival brought about by the pact was hailed as an indicator signalling the resurgence of the Lebanese democratic miracle. Still, speaking of a democrat...
