The Critical Security Studies (CSS) Working Group, launched in Spring 2016, takes a critical approach toward the proliferation of ‘security studies’ and ‘strategic studies’ programs and publications that are developing across the region, many of which advance state security interests rather than the security of individuals, communities and societies of the region. The CSS 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. In particular, the working group addresses encounters with the lived experiences of insecurity and precarity and the complex dynamics of contentious politics within pluralistic political environments. The group engages as well in scholarly knowledge production across and between North American, European, and Arab spheres and institutions. It has expanded to include scholars from or working across the region with similar concerns about developing a critical approach to security studies and aims at connecting regional and transnational networks through the Eastern Mediterranean city of Beirut.
The work of the CSS is organized under five themes each of which is managed by different members of the working group. These themes currently include the following:
This theme explores the ways in which violence and insecurity are increasingly tethered to the political economies of the Arab region and, in turn, how these political-economic landscapes are shaped by the exercise and production of insecurity. This is developed through three broad lines of inquiry: commodification of security, the relationship between capital accumulation and violence and the connections between aid provision and violence.
This theme explores the micro-relations of everyday experiences of (in)security by taking people’s experiences, understandings, and terminologies as starting points for what it means to feel (in)secure and further looks into the strategies people employ to live with some form of insecurity. The theme explores questions of how fear, risk, precarity, and instability operate in the daily maneuverings of people’s lives, and how aspiration, hope, and well-being are achieved and sustained.
This theme addresses the relationship between technology and security in the region. It seeks to investigate the implications of a wide range of technologies from GIS applications to biometric border management on the governance of security and production of (in)security.
This theme focuses on the politics of knowledge production in the field of International Relations of the Middle East and seeks to produce alternative approaches of theorizing knowledge on the region. The problematic is addressed by questioning the construction of global norms and engaging with conceptions that place the experience of peoples and states in the region at the center of theorizing.
This theme unpacks the making and remaking of borders in the Middle East in light of unfolding conflicts, and the so called “migration/refugee” crisis. It uses multiple approaches to explore the resilience or erosion of borders: ethnographies of borders (everyday smuggling, mobility of dwellers), unpacks deep historical (dis) connections (trade, exodus), or more contemporary practices of governing and securing the borders (surveillance, policing).
This theme examines security and securitization in the Arab region through a gendered lens and explores the intersection between militarization, economics, warfare, power politics, race, and gender. This theme adopts an intersectional approach and analyzing the ways in which social constructions of gender influence the conceptualization of important motifs in critical security studies such as conflict, organized violence, and peace. Through the intersectional lens, this theme also highlights the differential and gendered experiences of conflict and broadens the scope of security studies to include non-traditional threats such as economic inequality and gender-based violence.
The main activities of the working group have been the following:
A collectively authored document that outlines the intellectual genealogy of the project as well as its theoretical and empirical commitments. The manifesto also includes a series of small essays that reflect each of the authors’ particular interests and engagements within the field of critical security studies. You can access and read the manifesto via this link.
Members of the working group undertake work on specific issues related to the main themes detailed above through fieldwork, interviews, and archival work – which are then presented in roundtables, seminars and other activities, and also published in different outlets.
The Critical Security Studies Hub at The Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University Qatar (IAS_NUQ), known as the Qatar Hub, is a partnership that was established in 2023 between the Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS) and the Institute. 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.
Members of the working group plan, organize and participate in a number of events and roundtables, where they present and discuss issues pertinent to critical security studies in the Arab region. You can access roundtables curated by the CSS working group on The Beirut Forum via this link.
When funds are available, the working group organizes a small grants competition for scholars from the Arab region. The first call for research proposals was issued in December 2017.
As part of its goal to provide professional mentorship to scholars based in the Arab region, the Critical Security Studies working group organizes regular summer institutes to encourage and equip junior researchers with the necessary theoretical tools and practical skills for conducting critical research on issues of (in)security in the Arab region. So far, the ACSS has organized five summer institutes: in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2024 — all of which took place in Lebanon. Every rendition of the institute brings together between 10 and 20 participants with five to seven established faculty members who offer sessions on a range of methodological, theoretical, and professional issues.
The summer institute uses three complementary teaching strategies:
(1) Teaching sessions: The objective is to introduce students to the theories of critical security studies and their application in the Arab region. Faculty session leaders also present their contribution to this field and their ongoing work.
(2) Mentorship sessions: Participants are divided into working groups. Each group will be assigned to one faculty mentor. In each mentorship session, one or two participants are expected to present their research and receive feedback from faculty and peers.
(3) Writing sessions: Participants are asked to reflect on their experiences during the summer institute by writing a reflection piece on how the sessions contributed to further conceptualizing their research topics.
The summer institute also includes the following sessions and activities:
(1) Field Trip: This activity serves as a case study for one or more of the issues explored during the Institute.
(2) Professionalization workshops: Participants and faculty leaders discuss issues around publishing, fieldwork, teaching, and other professional concerns.
(3) Guest lectures: Guest speakers address issues that cater to the themes explored in participants’ research projects and to the overall field of critical security studies.
(4) Group Presentations: The Institute includes both closed meetings for each group, and open meetings for all participants and faculty members.
The learning objectives for the Summer Institute are as follows:
(1) Introduce participants to theories of critical security studies, and the methods through which critical research on security issues in the Arab region can be conducted.
(2) Provide a space for participants to present their research and receive verbal and written feedback from the faculty session leaders as well as from other participants.
(3) Bring participants and faculty members together in order to discuss issues around publishing, teaching, and other professional concerns.
To take a look at the working group’s publications, please visit the Beirut Forum.
The Beirut Forum
Established: 2017
The Beirut Forum serves to publish and disseminate the outputs of the ACSS working groups, including CSS.
In 2016, the CSS working group formed a two-person advisory board that provided guidance and oversight for the project during its first phase:
Omar Dahi is a professor of economics at Hampshire College as well as a research associate at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the founding director of Security in Context, a research network on peace, conflict, and international affairs. He has published in academic outlets such as the Journal of Development Economics and Applied Economics, Southern Economic Journal, Political Geography, Middle East Report, Forced Migration Review, and Critical Studies on Security. His last book was South-South Trade and Finance in the 21st Century: Rise of the South or a Second Great Divergence (co-authored with Firat Demir). Dahi also serves as an associate editor of the Review of Social Economy as well as the e-zine Jadaliyya and has served on the editorial committee of the Middle East Report.
Sami Hermez is an associate professor in residence of anthropology and the director of the Liberal Arts Program at Northwestern University in Qatar. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (UPenn 2017) and My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine (Stanford 2024). His broader research concerns include the study of social movements, the state, the future, memory, violence, and critical security in the Arab World. He has held posts as a visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, University of Pittsburgh’s Visiting Professor of Contemporary International Issues, a visiting professor of anthropology at Mt. Holyoke College, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Lebanese Studies, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University.
