Press Release
An audio recording from Rola el-Husseini, Research Associate Professor at the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center, the Graduate Center, City University of New York and author of Pax Syriana: Elite Politics in Postwar Lebanon.
On October 20, 2014 at MEI, Dr. el-Husseini spoke on her research in Lebanon and Syria and those countries' tangled shared political history in a talk titled after her 2012 book, "Pax Syriana: Elite Politics in Postwar Lebanon." After presenting this material, Dr. el-Husseini delved into current events and her research on Lebanese social and political life amidst the upheaval of the Syrian Civil War and the rise of ISIS. In her current research, Dr. el-Husseini focuses on Arab Shi'i and Sunni political thought, particularly in Lebanon, spending time on the ground in recent months to better understand the religious ideas and social forces at work there.
In the segment of her talk featured here, Dr. el-Husseini spoke about ISIS' ideological and logistical reach in largely Sunni Northern Lebanon and gave her estimation of what the Syrian Civil War has meant for Lebanese politics. Listen to the segment here:
Click here to view photos from the event on the Middle East Initiative Facebook page.
About Rola el-Husseini:
Rola el-Husseini is a research associate professor at MEMAC, the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has previously held positions at Texas A&M University and at Yale University. Her research interests include Lebanese and Syrian politics, political Islam, Iran and Shiism.
Her work has appeared in Contemporary Study of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, the Middle East Journal, Orient and Third World Quarterly in addition to several edited volumes.
She is the author of Pax Syriana: Elite Politics in Postwar Lebanon (Syracuse University Press, 2012) which includes a discussion of events in Lebanon from 1989 to 2011, with a primary focus on the period of Syrian institutionalized influence which lasted from the Ta'if agreement that ended the civil war to the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in 2005.