Documenting Lebanon’s Informal Bus System as a Tool for Social Change If, as French intellectual Bruno Latour develops in Où Atterir, Comment s’orienter en politique, describing our territories through the inequalities that traverse them is the first step towards social justice, then keeping the Lebanese bus system in the shadows…

On the upcoming parliamentary elections in Lebanon and the role of civil society This year’s elections are not only the first to be held in nine years, but are also the first to take place under the new electoral law decreed in June 2017, which, for the first time, will…

The specter of consociationalism is hovering over Syria today. After the Lebanese experience with corporate consociationalism[1], and the Iraqi experience with liberal consociationalism[2], it seems that Syria is next in the region to adopt a consociational arrangement. Consociational democracy has been proposed and adopted in many post-conflict countries around the…

More than seven years after the beginning of the popular uprising in Syria, which increasingly turned into an international war, the causes of this eruption are often forgotten. When they are discussed, the vast majority of authors reduce the uprising to a struggle against authoritarianism while neglecting its socio-economic roots…

The Marginalised Socio-Economics of Forced Displacements Since Russia’s intervention in Syria began in 2015 – and, prior to that, the proliferation of Iranian-backed militias around the country beginning in 2013 – the Syrian regime has won a series of military victories after years of territorial losses; victories which have allowed…