About the Book
Following Lebanon's formal political independence in 1943, women and men across class, sectarian, geographic, and ideological divides mobilized to build, challenge, and reform the institutional arrangements that would shape the country. The State of Lebanon explores how state institutions were important sites for the projection of power and of collective action in the wake of independence. Focusing on labor regimes, women's suffrage, the provision of electricity in Beirut, public education, and the armed forces, the book maps several arenas of struggle during 1943–1955, highlighting the alliances and conflicts, worldviews and strategies, and institutional trajectories that defined these arenas. The State of Lebanon challenges conventional narratives of an absent, weak, or failed state, as well as the reading of history backwards from the present. Instead, it shows how state institutional arrangements emerge as objects and subjects of political mobilization by politicians, bureaucrats, party activists, students, and workers, who in turn shaped the material and representational production of the Lebanese nation-state.
About the Speaker
Ziad Abu-Rish is Associate Professor of Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies at Bard College, where he directs the MA Program in Human Rights & the Arts. He is the author of The State of Lebanon: Popular Politics and Institution Building in the Wake of Independence (Stanford University Press, 2026) as well as several articles and chapters on modern Lebanon, the political economy of the Middle East, the Arab uprisings, and teaching Middle East history. Abu-Rish serves as co-editor of Jadaliyya e-zine and co-director of the Lebanese Dissertation Summer Institute. He earned his PhD in History from the University of California, Los Angeles and an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, Department of History