Prof. Karim Makdisi is an Associate Professor of International Politics and Director of the graduate program in Public Policy and International Affairs at The American University of Beirut (AUB).
He served as the Associate Director at AUB’s Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs for five years, and directed the “UN and the Arab World” research and policy program. Makdisi was a founding member and served on the first Board of Trustees of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), where is currently an Affiliated Researcher in the Critical Security Studies working group.
He was the primary investigator, at AUB, of two 3-year European Union projects: a Horizon 2020 research project entitled Middle East and North Africa Regional Architecture (MENARA, 2017-2019), a consortium of universities and research institutes across Europe and the Mediterranean looking into regional transformation in the Middle East.; and the Erasmus+ network project entitled EU-Middle East Network In Action (EUMENIA, 2018-2021).
He co-edited The Land of the Blue Helmets: United Nations in the Arab World (University of California Press, 2017) (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1fq9w0g) ; Between Regional Autonomy and Intervention: New Conflict Dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa (https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep30718); and Interventions in Conflict: International Peacemaking in the Middle East (https://www.ibs.it/interventions-in…/e/9781137564672).
His recent publications include:
“Lebanon’s October 2019 Uprising: From Solidarity to Division and Descent into the Known Unknown,” Southern Quarterly Journal (April 2021)
“Teaching IR ‘Out of Place’ in Beirut: Evolving Through the Experience of Everyday Politics and Insecurity,” International Studies Perspective, December 2020
“Teaching Trump’s ‘America First’ in/from Beirut,” PS: Political Science & Politics (2020)
“Exploring the UN and OPCW Partnership in Syrian Chemical Weapons Disarmament: Inter-organizational Cooperation and Autonomy,” (with C. Pison-Hindawi) Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, 25:2019, 535-562
“The Syrian Chemical Weapons Disarmament Process in Context: Narratives of Coercion, Consent, and Everything in Between,” (with C. Pison-Hindawi) Third World Quarterly, Issue 8.