Critical Security Studies in the Arab Region
The Critical Security Studies Working Group was launched in Spring 2016 and takes a critical approach toward the proliferation of ‘security studies’ literature on and in the region as well as ‘strategic studies’ programs that are developing across the region. Mainstream approaches tend to advance state security interests and world power interests rather than the security of individuals, communities and societies of the region. The Working Group engages with existing frameworks from the field of critical security studies but also strives to move beyond them to develop alternative approaches based on regional realities, in an effort to understand the materialization of new security concerns, dynamics, spaces and affects. It also aims at connecting regional and transnational networks through the Eastern Mediterranean city of Beirut. This Working Group is coordinated by Professors Omar S. Dahi (Hampshire College) and Sami Hermez (Northwestern University in Qatar). During the project’s first phase (2016-2020), the working group was coordinated by Professors Omar S. Dahi and Samer Abboud (Villanova University).
In 2023, the ACSS and The Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University Qatar (IAS_NUQ) co-established a Critical Security Studies Hub, known as the Qatar Hub. It emerges as an initiative of the ACSS Critical Security Studies working group to create hubs of activity around the region to promote scholarship on security issues that are embedded in the experiences of the region. The Qatar hub brings together scholars from different institutions in Qatar to think together and develop scholarship and programming that will advance thinking around questions of (in)security.
Publications
“Critical Security and Anthropology from the Middle East”
by Giulia El Dardiry and Sami Hermez in Cultural Anthropology (2020).
“Towards a Beirut School of Critical Security Studies”
by Samer Abboud, Omar S. Dahi, Waleed Hazbun, Nicole S. Grove, Coralie Pison Hindawi, Jamil Mouawad, and Sami Hermez in Critical Studies on Security (2018).
by Waleed Hazbun and Morten Valbjørn in American Political Science Association MENA Newsletter (2018).
“Climate Change and the Syrian Civil War Revisited”
by Jan Selby, Omar S. Dahi, Christiane Fröhlich, and Mike Hulme in Political Geography (2017).
“The Cartographic Ambiguities of Harassmap: Crowdmapping Security and Sexual Violence in Egypt”
by Nicole S. Grove in Security Dialogue (2015).