About the Book
Lebanon gained its formal political independence in 1943. During the dozen years that followed, women and men across class, sectarian, geographic, and ideological divides built, challenged, and reformed the institutional arrangements that would shape the country. With this book, Ziad Abu-Rish traces shifting patterns of alliances and conflict that shaped the material and representational production of the Lebanese nation-state. Exploring labor regimes, women's suffrage, the provision of electricity in Beirut, public education, and the armed forces—and the meetings, lectures, pamphlets, delegations, and protests they produced—Abu-Rish demonstrates how elite and popular groups mobilized normative ideas about independence and state power.
The State of Lebanon offers a new social and institutional history of post-colonial Lebanon. Abu-Rish challenges common narratives of an absent, weak, or failed state. Instead, state institutional arrangements emerge as objects and subjects of political mobilization by politicians, bureaucrats, party activists, students, and workers. Rather than read history backward from the present, he approaches the past on its own terms. In so doing, Abu-Rish offers significant insights into politics, social life, and the state in Lebanon—grounded in the early post-independence period yet critical to how we understand Lebanon today.
About the Speaker
Ziad Abu-Rish is a scholar of the modern Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. His research centers around state formation, economic development, and popular mobilizations, particularly in Lebanon and Jordan. His teaching experience includes undergraduate and graduate courses in human rights; comparative state formation; various themes in Middle East studies; and research methodologies. Abu-Rish is the author of The State of Lebanon: Popular Politics and Institution Building in the Wake of Independence (Stanford University Press, 2026). He co-created (with artist Tania El Khoury) The Search for Power, a touring lecture performance and sound installation exploring the history of electricity in Beirut. Abu-Rish is also coeditor of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (2012) and Critical Voices: A Collection of Interviews from and on the Middle East (2015). Abu-Rish has also authored several articles appearing in Middle East Report and Review of Middle East Studies and chapters in edited volumes on the political economy of the Middle East, the Arab uprisings, and teaching Middle East history. Abu-Rish also serves as coeditor of Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya e-zine, and codirector of the Lebanese Dissertation Summer Institute.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies