The Beirut Critical Security Studies Collective (BCSSC), as one of the 8 working groups of the Arab Council of Social Sciences (ACSS), aims to bring together scholars from across the Arab region and beyond to do joint research on security issues, thereby enabling the exchange of academic knowledge, skills and experience. The project was launched in the Spring 2016 with the aim to take a critical approach toward security, strategic, military and conflict studies. This approach pays particular attention to context-specificity, context-sensitivity and situatedness, especially focusing on the Arab region. It tries to problematise the conventional prioritisation of state security interests over individuals, communities, and societies’ dimensions of security.
The Beirut School reflects a wider attempt to read international politics from a non-Western perspective, which is also embodied by the work of other similar schools such as the School of Singapore, the Legon School in Ghana and the Howard School in the US. Moreover, the School is currently trying to establish more regional spill-overs of its activity - a first step was made in 2023 when the ACSS and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at North-western University Qatar co-established a Critical Security Studies Hub, known as the Qatar Hub.
The work of the Collective addresses five main research themes which investigate the way specific factors interact with and affect in/security in the region. They are entitled by the Collective as follows: “political economy of (in)security”, “(in)security of everyday life”, “technologies of security”, “knowledge production and rethinking global norms and practices”, “borders, migration, and mobility”.
Among the activities of the School, the organisation of Summer Institutes stands out: a Beirut-based summer school in the form of seminar and workshop sessions, open to all graduate and doctoral students, junior scholars and researchers engaged in critical approaches to questions of security in the SWANA countries. Participants are offered the opportunity to work with established faculty members who provide sessions on a range of theoretical, epistemological and methodological issues. The main aim is to advance knowledge production from the region and establish linkages between the region and academic institutions around the world.
Samer N. Abboud is the co-coordinator of the Beirut School of Critical Security Studies and Associate Professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University. He was born and raised in Canada; he completed his PhD in the UK, at the University of Exeter. His research agenda has been focused, among other topics, on illicit cross border trade between Lebanon and Syria. In 2015 he published the first edition of his book, titled Syria, followed by a new edition in 2018. He is the co-author (with Benjamin J. Muller) of Rethinking Hezbollah: Authority, Legitimacy, Violence (2012). He has published on topics of political economy and security in the SWANA region 1, in top journals such as Security Dialogue, Critical Studies on Security, Journal of International and Statebuilding, Peacebuilding.
In his article “Teaching the Arab World and the West…As an Arab in the West” (2015), he has shared his experience of teaching an undergraduate course called The Arab World and the West. In his view, the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq triggered a renewed interest in the study of the Middle East. Indeed, courses that focus on the history and politics of the Middle East have increased: Abboud states that, despite some reflections about the role of colonialism and outside powers in influencing the region, little attention is paid to how these dynamics shape the relations between SWANA and Western countries. In his experience lecturing students at two universities, he noticed that stereotypes and misconceptions about the SWANA region are recurrent features in his classes. His goal was thus to promote students’ engagement and critical thinking about the region. He believes that both students’ and teachers’ positionality should be taken seriously since it affects the class context and the process of learning and teaching: IR professors, therefore, should consider the different experiences and identities that coexist in the classroom. He disagrees with the idea that education should be conducted in neutral environments.
SWANA stands for South West Asia and North Africa. It is a decolonial term used to contest, resist and provide an alternative to denominations such as Middle East, Near East, Arab World, Islamic World, Levant … that are considered Eurocentric and Orientalising.
Researching on the Syrian case (interview released by Jadaliyya)
Despite the difficulty to ascribe the School’s project to one particular intellectual trajectory, its work draws inspiration from the postcolonial landscape where the contributions of authors such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon and Mohammed Ayoob can be placed, as well as the emerging field of Global IR. In the wake of postcolonial thinking, it challenges SWANA’s attributed exceptional status in the international order by using regional cases to engage IR theory. It also draws upon the contributions of Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey by embracing their critique to the Eurocentrism which dominates conventional studies of security. Its collective agrees on the need for a co-constitutive or “contrapuntal” analysis, that would enable a more comprehensive reading of categories such as peace, war, security and insecurity, by considering both Western and non-Western perspectives.
Firstly, the School’s critical research builds on the following question: who is entitled to study non-Western IR?
The School’s collective shares the endeavour to overcome the Eurocentric legacy of social science research and the academic imperialism/epistemic racism (or at least epistemic injustice) that this may entail. Such processes have led to generations of scholars that produce and reproduce global hierarchies and inequalities in terms of text, language and assumptions of the research, which are often uncritically imported in the study of social sciences in the non-Western world.
This results in the existence of double standards: while Western scholars “dominate” sites and institutions of knowledge production and circulation (i.e. conferences), researchers in the global social sciences peripheries have little access to such resources, communities and networks. This problem is aggravated by the limited availability of public/institutional fundings for research and by the linguistic barrier involving, especially those researchers working in non-Western languages who have difficulties in submitting to and revising manuscripts for academic publications. All this culminates in the limited availability of social sciences critical research emanating from the region.
Secondly, the collective commits to reflect on what Critical Security Studies can do to
overcome some of these barriers not only academically but also socially and institutionally.
The School’s approach adopts a broader perspective on security and insecurity, which encompasses but also moves beyond the concept of state. Security is not considered a “taken for granted” objective, fixed and reified entity, but rather contextual, mutable and inter-subjective. Its members seek to understand the processes that lead to conceptualising specific IR categories as dangers, threats and risks. For this reason, while the Beirut School was conceived within the tradition of Critical Security Studies, it also identified gaps in the work of schools such as the Copenhagen, Aberystwyth and Paris ones: being predominantly rooted in European institutional and academic structures, they tend to reproduce the marginalisation of
Arab scholars writing about the Arab region, from the Arab region and for the Arab region, as effectively put by Waleed Hazbun in the School’s “manifesto” (“Towards a Beirut School of critical security studies”). New concepts of security are needed, and they should be framed and contoured by the people living and researching in the region since they are ultimately familiar with the ways security and insecurity are produced.
The School thus focuses on human and individual securities and seeks to counter the neglected impact of practices such as military interventions and international sanctions not only on states but also on peoples and societies. It also values a genealogical approach to deeply grasp how the region is (or is not) integrated into global structures, institutions and debates on global security. Last but not least, the School seeks to overcome a mainstream understanding of the state (Weberian, Westphalian, with clear territorial and institutional dimensions, implying binary conceptualisations such as inside/outside, national/international, state/society).
Differently, as explained by Jamil Mouawad in the abovementioned “manifesto”, the School aims to overcome the dichotomy between weak and strong states. It questions the depiction of the Arab state as “failed”, “weak”, a barbarian or even absent entity, and since the 2011 wave of Arab mobilisations, as a project that requires building anew. Conversely, the School suggests to focus on people's experiences and perceptions of statehood and the role of the state, especially in relation to the provision of securities and insecurities in the SWANA region. Non-state actors, which are traditionally conceived as anti-state, may actually provide alternative and heterodox forms of security and order outside of the state field.
Coralie Pison Hindawi has extensively researched upon the concept of Responsibility to Protect, and realised that critical scholars tend to misinterpret it by associating it to humanitarian interventions. However, this take neglects that in many countries from the Global South R2P and humanitarian interventions are decoupled. In this regard, she states that associating R2P with humanitarian intervention, scholars tend to accept this Western interpretation which demands its military dimension.
Coralie Pison Hindawi has recently recovered the topic considering the latest developments in the Palestinian occupied territories. Indeed, in the context of Gaza’s Great March of Return demonstrations in 2019, the Beirut School’s collective criticised Western countries such as the United States for their complicity with the Israeli repressive policies. In addition, they claimed that these countries contributed to the oppression of Palestinians and the refusal of their rights to self-determination by withdrawing from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and transferring the US embassy to Jerusalem, among other actions.
In response to this, in 2019 Coralie Pison Hindawi gathered a group of scholars to examine the R2P doctrine in relation to the Palestinian people, and to discuss its applicability, usefulness, and general significance for the Palestinian case. The R2P doctrine states that if the national authorities in charge are unable or unwilling to protect their populations from unlawful acts, then the international community bears the responsibility to protect them. All the scholars agreed that due to the nature of the crimes inflicted on the Palestinians and the lack of a State able or willing to protect them, the R2P doctrine was applicable and significant. Therefore, they wondered whether international norms and practices are globally effective, or are they just tools in the hands of hegemonic powers to be employed when convenient, and discarded when inconvenient? Today, in response to the developments since October 7th, 2023, they decided to republish that series of essays, first published in 2019, calling for an immediate ceasefire, boundless humanitarian aid to Palestinians, and for an international investigation into the war crimes against humanity that have been carried out.
In this regard, Coralie Pison Hindawi writes: As much as we would have all liked to be proven wrong, the events of the recent weeks, the scale of the violence, massive displacements, use of ignominious dehumanising language by Israeli representatives now unequivocally confirm that Palestinians are either subject to or at immediate risk of being subjected to all four types of international crimes that the R2P doctrine was supposed to protect them from. […] Once again, the main question that remains is not that of international norms, applicability or relevance but that of their actual implementation. Once again, both the state(s) directly in charge and the most influential members of the international community are failing to provide the protection that Palestinians, as any other human group, are entitled to. Once again, help is coming from the rest rather than from the West, and from below rather from the centres of power.
The Beirut School’s webpage
Dr. Samer Abboud Explores the Causes of Upheaval in Syria (2012):
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/watch?v=NI7lsyjVk6o
Dr. Samer Abboud Presenting the Beirut School of Security Studies at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane (2018): https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/watch?v=nNHocpC4Nx8
Samer Abboud on “The Making of Syria's Illiberal Peace” (2020):
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/watch?v=pDUrOB1Non4
Costantini I. and Hanau Santini R. (2022) Waiting for IR Godot? In search of transformative encounters between Middle Eastern Studies and International Relations. Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica. 52(2): 203-216