Populism, Neoliberalism, and the Lebanese Present
A public lecture by Andrew Arsan (Cambridge University)
Wednesday, 26 June 2019
5:00pm
Auditorium B1, College Hall, American University of Beirut
A great deal has been written in recent years on the rise of populism and neoliberalism—to many, the defining traits of our late modern world. This work, however, has tended to focus on large states—on Brazil, Russia, India, the United States, or Poland. In this talk, I draw on my recent book Lebanon: A Country in Fragments to ask what neoliberalism and populism look like when examined from the vantage point of a small state like Lebanon. Doing so can help us to shed new light, both on the relationship between populism and neoliberalism, and on contemporary Lebanon. Far from an exception to global patterns, this talk argues, Lebanon offers us insight into the present moment—as well as a glimpse into the future.
Andrew Arsan is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Cambridge. Andrew is the author of two books, Interlopers of Empire: the Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa(2014), which won the 2015 Royal Historical Society Gladstone Prize, and Lebanon: A Country in Fragments (2018). He is the recipient of a 2018 Philip Leverhulme Prize for his work on modern Arab political thought, and is currently at work on a history of the lands that became Lebanon, from 1516 to 2005.
This event is co-sponosred by The Arab Studies Institute (ASI) and AUB’s Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES), and is presented as part of the 2019 Lebanon Dissertation Summer Institute.