The OIBlog from Beirut and Cairo
Nükhet Varlık Plague is an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. It is known to have affected human societies for at least the last five thousand years. During its long history, it...
Interview with Pierre France What question can the reader of your book answer after reading it?There are two questions. One could be framed as a response to a classic debate in comparative political science...
Joshua Hudelson Amid the seemingly endless COVID lockdown that is currently underway in Beirut, it is easy to forget what it’s like to be in a crowded place. Yet barely more than a...
Since 1947, more than 700,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes in what is now Israel, and have become refugees. As a traumatic experience, the Nakba has become a crucial part of the...
State, Institutions and Governance in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine Abdelhadi Alijla Why do certain divided societies lack trust between their members more than others? Why are divided societies more prone to the collapse of...
Alex Rodriguez Suarez The project I am undertaking at the Orient-Institut Beirut focuses on bell ringing on Mount Lebanon throughout the centuries; two keywords to define it are religious soundscape and material culture. The...
The political post-war order in the wake of the Second World War, the division of the world into the so-called Western powers led by the USA and the so-called Eastern Bloc led by the...
By Jonathan Kriener In the winter term of 2010/11, postgraduate students of sociology at the Lebanese University (UL) protested against its newly established Doctoral School for Humanities and Social Sciences. The campaigners claimed that...
By Stefan Maneval When the Lebanese Adyan Foundation set out to produce a textbook aiming to foster acceptance of religious and cultural diversity, it was planning to create one volume for all religious...
In April 1974, the magazine of the PLO’s Palestine Research Center, Shu’un Filastiniyya, dedicated an eight-page article to “the left” and “the solidarity movement with the Palestinian revolution” in West Germany. The author listed...
Ever since the beginning of the ill-labelled Arab Spring, crowds, collective action and popular contentions have become the core of scholarly scrutiny as well as political and public discourses. Yet, the genealogy of popular...
In May 2017, the Lebanese-Canadian House was officially inaugurated as part of the Lebanese Diaspora village in the historic centre of Batroun, a coastal city in North Lebanon. Three successful businesspersons who live in...
This project by OIB postdoctoral fellow Marieke Krijnen focuses on the increasing interconnections between real estate and finance in Lebanon. Real estate has always been dependent on the financial sector for loans, but the...
Sarah Doebbert Epstein spent a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the OIB, from October 2016 until the end of this month, to develop the core of a book on the basis of ongoing research in...
As a tool for understanding how the heritage of political thought in the Middle East developed during its intellectually most productive periods, SCRIPT will offer access to a vast and varied literature, in Arabic...
