MOUAWAD, Jamil

Jamil Mouawad was awarded a PhD in politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in June 2015. Later, he joined the Institut Français du Proche-Orient (IFPO) in Beirut, as a postdoctoral fellow, through a grant from the Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS). He also acted as a researcher coordinator of the Critical Security Studies in the Arab world and the Ethics in Social sciences project, both on-going projects launched by ACSS.

His research interests in state-society relations span the subfields of comparative politics and political economy. He specializes in the politics of the Middle East, with a focus on governance and limited statehood.

During the Max Weber Fellowship, he will finalize his book, based on his PhD thesis. The book presents a critique to the concept of ‘weak’ states. The central argument of his book is that ‘weakness’ does not capture the nature of the Lebanese state and that the patterns of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ are by no means incidental but central to the way politics works.

In addition, he aims to launch a new comparative project on the state, ‘state as an object of desire’ in the Arab world.

As a SOAS PhD candidate, Jamil worked as teaching assistant for an undergraduate course on the History of the Middle East and an MA course on state-society relations in the Arab world. At Saint-Joseph University in Beirut (2016-2017) he was a lecturer teaching courses on the modern history of Lebanon,  political history of the Middle East, in addition to MA courses on Liberalization and Democratization in the Middle East.