Our plan to co-edit this book came from a desire to provide an initial account of the historic events of October 2019 through the voices of some of its protagonists.
Jeffrey G. Karam and Rima Majed
Jeffrey G. Karam is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Lebanese American University. He is currently a Research Fellow with the Forum Transregionale Studien’s Europe in the Middle East-The Middle East in Europe (EUME) program and the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Politics at Freie Universität Berlin. He has held postdoctoral fellowships and visiting professorships at Harvard University, Boston University, and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. From 2018 to 2022, Karam was a non-resident Research Associate at Harvard University’s Middle East Initiative. As a scholar between Beirut and Berlin, Karam's research and writing focus on the politics of intelligence and foreign policy, revolutions and counter-revolutions, and transformational moments of political change in West Asia and North Africa, with an emphasis on the Arab world. Karam is the editor of The Middle East in 1958: Reimagining A Revolutionary Year (I.B. Tauris and Bloomsbury, 2020), co-editor of The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution (I.B. Tauris and Bloomsbury, 2022), and one of the editors of Global Authoritarianism: Perspectives and Contestations from the South (Transcript and Columbia University Press, 2022). Karam is the author of numerous publications, and his research has been published in academic and public outlets, including Intelligence and National Security, the Arab Studies Journal, Journal of Political Science Education, The Washington Post, H-Diplo/ISSF, openDemocracy, TRAFO, the Daily Star Lebanon, Megaphone, Jadaliyya. He tweets @JGKaram.
Rima Majed is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies Department at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Her work focuses on the fields of social movements, sectarianism, political economy, and conflict. She is currently a visiting fellow at the Belfert Center at Harvard University (2022/23). Previously, she has held visiting positions at the Bobst Centre for Peace and Justice at Princeton University (2018/19) and at the Finnish Institute in the Middle East (2021). Her work has appeared in several academic journals, books, and media platforms such as Social Forces, American Political Science Review, Mobilization, Routledge Handbook on the Politics of the Middle East, Middle East Law and Governance Journal, Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East, Global Dialogue, Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology, Al Jumhuriya, OpenDemocracy, Jacobin, Middle East Eye, Megaphone, CNN and Al Jazeera English. She is also the co-editor of The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution (I.B. Tauris, 2022), and the Principal Investigator on the “Critical Approaches to Development Studies" project at the American University of Beirut.
