Date: April 22-25, 2027 | Beirut, Lebanon
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The Arab Council for the Social Sciences is pleased to announce its eighth conference, titled “Forging Futures: Society, State and Economy Amid Precarity & Agency” to be held in Beirut, Lebanon on April 22-25, 2027.
Abstracts will be selected based on two criteria:
The conference is open to contributions from all social science and allied disciplines and to scholars from the Arab region and the rest of the world. Applicants must hold at least an MA degree and be actively engaged in social science research. Papers may examine contemporary or historical phenomena. Comparative, empirical, cross-regional and global perspectives are particularly encouraged.
Forging Futures: Society, State and Economy Amid Precarity & Agency
The Arab region is experiencing a pivotal historical moment marked by profound transformations affecting states, societies, and economies. The state has become a contested entity while society is pulled between fragmentation and solidarity, producing a complex landscape of state fragility, social marginalization, and structural economic dysfunction and inequality. These conditions raise urgent questions about the future both as a field of inquiry and a space for imagining trajectories of reconstruction and recovery. They also call for renewed attention to the roles of social, political, and economic actors in shaping struggles over resources, power, and the future itself. At the same time, conventional analytical frameworks in the social sciences and humanities are no longer sufficient to capture these dynamics, making it necessary to rethink them alongside diverse forms of knowledge and expression, including from cultural activism and the arts.
Against this backdrop, the ACSS conference examines the structural conditions through which state, society, and the economy reproduce forms of fragility and inequality. It explores institutions marked by contested sovereignty, limited autonomy, and weakened legitimacy; social relations characterized by declining trust; and economic arrangements that perpetuate inequity. It adopts a critical approach that interrogates the epistemological deconstruction of existing social, economic, and political structures and examines their relationship to social actors in the context of successive crises, civil wars, and wars of extermination. At the same time, the conference investigates how these conditions generate diverse forms of agency expressed through resilience, resistance, and transformation. Through renewing analytical and epistemological approaches, recovering marginalized and invisible experiences, and fostering collective social, political, and intellectual visions, the conference aims to imagine and articulate possible futures amid conditions of profound uncertainty.
The Eighth Conference of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences will be organized around four sub-themes:
While sovereignty is conventionally understood as the authority of states over territory, populations, and political decision-making, sovereignty in the Arab region has been shaped by complex histories of, and present-day colonialism, empire, nation-building, conflict, and global intervention. Recent wars and escalating regional confrontations have brought renewed urgency to questions of sovereignty, exposing the vulnerabilities of state authority and raising fundamental debates about territorial integrity, external intervention, self-determination, liberation, resistance, and political legitimacy. Beyond conflict, contemporary transformations such as migration, economic restructuring, environmental crises, digital governance, and shifting geopolitical alignments continue to challenge and redefine the meaning and practice of sovereignty.
This conference theme invites papers that critically examine sovereignty as both a political principle and a lived and practiced reality. We welcome contributions that explore how sovereignty is claimed, contested, negotiated, or fragmented across different scales, from local communities and municipalities to states, regional organizations, and transnational actors. Papers may address questions of war and peace, territorial control, citizenship, borders, security, governance, resource management, legal authority, and political legitimacy, as well as the role of international institutions, humanitarian regimes, and post-war reconstruction and state-formation in shaping sovereign power.
The blockage of the Strait of Hormuz wreaked havoc in global supply chains and disrupted crucial flows of oil, pesticides, commercial flights, grain supplies and data among other resources; highlighting the crucial ways through which global capitalism is anchored and shaped in Middle Eastern and North African geographies. This theme of the conference invites scholarship that anchors the region as an active protagonist in the making of global political economic realities and the futures they forge as they open up pressing questions around how the economic and the ecological are shaped, narrated and contested. Papers can address themes such as:
Given the expansion in the types and levels of conflict and war, “reconstruction” has become a main concern across the region, and is often replacing “development” as a focus of states and other actors. It is important that research focuses on documenting and understanding the immediate and long-term impact of these changes and how “reconstruction” reconfigures economies, societies, communities and individual lives. In other words, “Reconstruction” needs to be “deconstructed” as discourses, practices and policies. Papers may focus on such aspects as:
The humanities and social sciences produced in the Arab region offer a compelling reflection of the realities of its societies: the challenges states face in implementing public policies; the vitality with which societies articulate their identities and aspirations; the turbulent transformations of regional economies; and the growing tension between emerging forms of agency on the one hand and persistent structural fragility on the other. Equally significant is the context in which this knowledge is produced, where the traditional and the contemporary, the academic and the non-academic, scholarly research and literary and artistic production all coexist. The modes through which these knowledges are disseminated—journal articles, book chapters, monographs, artistic works, literary texts, and the diverse representations circulating across social media platforms and digital networks, in Arabic and other languages—continue to proliferate and intersect in ways that both enrich and complicate the experience of knowledge production and reception.
Within this context, the arts and literature serve as vital bridges for expressing the wounds of individuals and communities affected by war and conflict. They contribute to making sense of collective trauma, preserving collective memory, rebuilding identities, and generating new narratives that foster critical thinking, pluralism, and respect for difference.
Papers submitted under this theme may address, but are not limited to, the following questions:
The ACSS invites abstracts for individual paper presentations or for organized panels. The Conference Organizing Committee will review all applications and select the final list of presenters.
Note: You can only participate in one panel, either through an individual paper or an organized panel; you cannot be part of two panels.
We strongly encourage applications in Arabic; however, abstracts may be submitted in Arabic, English or French and should be in the language of the planned paper and presentation. Simultaneous translation will be available at the conference.
1) Individual Applicants
To submit an abstract, please create an account and a Profile Page on the ACSS Applications Platform, then apply to the conference by filling out the online application form for the Eighth ACSS Conference, including an abstract of approximately 500 words. See this page for guidelines on how to write a successful abstract.
Please note that applicants can submit a co-authored paper. In such cases, only one author should complete the individual conference application and include the required information on the co-author(s).
To submit an individual paper application, click here.
2) Organized Panels
The ACSS strongly encourages research teams, collectives or research institutions to submit an organized panel on the themes of the conference. Each panel should include 3-4 papers and the panel organizer should also present a paper in the panel.
For organized panels that would like to include a discussant, the panel should include 3 speakers and the discussant.
To submit a panel proposal, please create an account and a Profile Page on the ACSS Applications Platform, then apply to the conference by filling out the online application form for the Eighth ACSS Conference, including the panel abstract of approximately 500 words.
To submit a proposal for an organized panel, click here.
The deadline for submissions is October 15, 2026. Selection decisions will be announced on December 20, 2026.
Selected participants are required to submit their completed papers by March 1, 2027. If the paper is not received by this deadline, the participant will be removed from the conference program.
All conference abstracts will be posted on the ACSS website and made publicly available. Paper presenters may be asked to revise their abstracts for posting. In addition, the full conference papers will be made available to all the conference participants on a password-protected webpage or Dropbox.
After the conference, the ACSS may invite a number of papers for inclusion in one or more publications, which may include translation of the paper into different languages. Individuals are free to accept or decline to take part in these planned publications.
Conference presentations should be 15-20 minutes per paper and may be presented in Arabic, English or French. Simultaneous translation from English and French into Arabic and from Arabic to English will be provided. The conference site will be A/V equipped. Additional details on the composition of individual panels will be available after selection decisions are announced in December 2026.
Subject to available funding, the ACSS will aim to provide accommodation and travel support for accepted participants who are based in the region. For accepted participants based outside the region, support will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Further details regarding available funding will be communicated in January 2027, after the accepted participants are announced.
If not selected to present a paper at the conference, please note that applicants are encouraged to register to attend the conference, which will be open to the public.
For any technical inquiries about the application process, please contact the IT Officer, Wassim Alam, at: alam@theacss.org
For any inquiry about the Eighth Conference, please contact Rola Kiladjian at: kiladjian@theacss.org
Ali Abdullatif Ahmida is a Libyan scholar and founding chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of New England (USA). Educated at Cairo University and the University of Washington, he specializes in political theory, comparative politics, and historical sociology. His research focuses on power, anti-colonial resistance, state formation, and genocide in North Africa, with particular emphasis on modern Libya.
Professor Ahmida is the author and editor of several influential books, including The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization and Resistance, Forgotten Voices: Power and Agency in Colonial and Postcolonial Libya, The Libyan Novel, and the award-winning Genocide in Libya: Shar, A Hidden Colonial History, which received the 2022 AIMS L. Carl Brown Book Prize. He has published extensively in leading academic journals and has lectured at universities across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Akeel Almarai was born in the city of Jarabulus (Upper Euphrates) in the Syrian Arab Republic. He earned a BA in Arts from the University of Aleppo, followed by a postgraduate diploma from the same university. He then continued his studies at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, where he spent four years before moving to Italy. In 2000, he received his PhD in Islamic Civilization (Historical and Philological Studies) from the Sapienza University of Rome.
He is Professor of the History of Islam and Islamic Systems in the Oriental Studies Program at the University of Siena, Italy. He is a member of the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus and the Arabic Language Academy in Cairo, and an honorary member of the Jordan Academy of Arabic. He serves on the Board of the Center for Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Siena and is a member of the European Association for Arabic and Islamic Studies. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed literary series dedicated to translating intellectual and creative works from Arabic into Italian. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences.
He has been a visiting professor at numerous Arab and European universities, including the Universities of Granada, Málaga, Tilburg, Helsinki, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Exeter, Helwan, Qatar, and Gazi University in Ankara. He has also been affiliated with several research centers, including the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha and the Royal Hashemite Documentation Centre in Amman. In addition, he serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Jordanian journal Raghadan.
His research focuses on the political, social, and intellectual history of Islam during the medieval period, as well as the political, social, and religious history of Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria) in the modern era. He is currently engaged in collecting, studying, translating into Arabic, and analyzing documents preserved in the Italian Central State Archives relating to the history of Bilad al-Sham and the Arab Revolt in the early twentieth century.
His publications include The Fall of Baghdad, or Twenty Days of Jihad in Iraq (in Italian), co-authored with Alessandra Persichetti, and A Passage from East to West: The Silk Road to and from the Mediterranean, co-authored with Carla Bagna and Wafaa R. El Beih.
Fahed Bishara is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he specializes in the history of the modern Middle East and the Indian Ocean world. His research explores the intersections of law, commerce, empire, mobility, and capitalism, with a particular focus on the Arabian Peninsula and the western Indian Ocean from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.
Dr. Bishara is the author of A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), an award-winning study that reexamines the legal and commercial networks linking East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and South Asia. His second book, Monsoon Voyagers: Shipowners and the Making of the Indian Ocean World (Yale University Press, 2024), traces the histories of maritime communities and examines how shipowners navigated changing political and economic landscapes to shape the Indian Ocean as a connected region.
His current research investigates the histories of capitalism, infrastructure, and mobility across the Indian Ocean, with particular attention to the relationships between local actors, imperial power, and global economic transformations.
Sarah El-Kazaz is Associate Professor in the politics department at SOAS, University of London and author of Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul (Duke UP, 2023). Her research interests include: critical political economy, urbanism, infrastructure and digital politics, and her new book project investigates the politics of digital infrastructures by following “Cloud” technologies across the Global South. Her work appears in peer-reviewed journals including: Comparative Studies in Society and History, and City and Society. She is co-convenor of the public seminar series on Histories of Capitalism and Race in the Middle East and Beyond through the Walter Rodney Collective at SOAS and is on the editorial board of Economy and Society and editorial team of the Arab Studies Journal. She previously taught at Oberlin College, and completed a PhD at Princeton University.
Abaher El Sakka, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Birzeit University and Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Birzeit University. He holds a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Nantes, France, and is a graduate of the Graduate School of Social Organization Management (Ecole Supérieure) in Saint-Étienne, France. He served as a lecturer at the University of Nantes, France, from 1998 to 2006, and as a visiting professor at numerous French and Belgian universities from 2009 to 2026. He has authored numerous scholarly studies and articles in the fields of the sociology of colonialism, social history, the social history of the city of Gaza, artistic and social expressions, social movements, identity, memory, nationalisms, urban studies, social policy, and the social sciences and their historiography. He has published several books and studies in Arabic, French, and English.
He is Editor-in-Chief of Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology, President of the Palestinian Sociological and Anthropological Association, and a member of the International Sociological Association and the International Association of French-Speaking Sociologists. He also serves as Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, in addition to his membership in other international institutions.
Dina Rizk Khoury is Professor Emerita of History at George Washington University and a member of the ACSS Board of Trustees. Her scholarly work includes two books: State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire, and Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering Martyrdom and Remembrance both published by Cambridge University Press, as well as several articles in scholarly journals in both English and Arabic. She has been a manuscript reviewer for journals and book publishers in the US and Britain as well as journals such as Ostour Omran issued by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha. Her current research and writing focus on labor migrations in the Persian Gulf before oil.
Eileen Kuttab is a Palestinian sociologist, feminist scholar, and activist whose work focuses on gender, labor, citizenship, social movements, and development in Palestine and the broader Arab region. She is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Birzeit University, where she played a leading role in advancing feminist scholarship and interdisciplinary research. Throughout her academic career, she has contributed to the development of gender studies and has been actively engaged in research, teaching, and public advocacy on women’s rights, social justice, and democratic transformation.
Dr. Kuttab’s research examines the intersections of gender, class, nationalism, and political economy, with particular attention to women’s labor, informal economies, youth, citizenship, and the social consequences of occupation and conflict. She has published extensively in Arabic and English and has contributed to numerous regional and international research initiatives on gender, development, and social change. Dr. Kuttab served on the ACSS Founding Board of Trustees and leads the ACSS Focal Point in Palestine.
Afrah Jasim is a Professor of Social Work and Sociology at the University of Baghdad, College of Arts, Department of Sociology. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the University of Baghdad, College of Arts, in 1998, followed by a Master’s degree in Social Work from the same university in 2001, and a PhD in Social Work in 2007. She was promoted to the rank of Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Baghdad in 2014.
She has published numerous research articles and scholarly studies in peer-reviewed local, regional, and international journals. Her research focuses on the impacts of war and armed conflict, psychological trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and their effects on individuals, families, and communities, particularly vulnerable populations, minorities, and survivors of violence, displacement, and disasters.
She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences since 2025 and has served on a wide range of scientific, academic, and administrative committees.
Driss Maghraoui is Professor of History and International Relations at Al Akhawayn University. A historian and political analyst, his research focuses on modern North Africa and the Middle East, with particular interests in nationalism, colonialism, memory, migration, democracy, human rights, and political reform. His scholarship examines the historical and contemporary dynamics of state–society relations, identity formation, and processes of social and political transformation in Morocco and the wider Arab region.
He has published extensively in Arabic, English, and French on topics including modern Moroccan history, colonial and postcolonial politics, migration, citizenship, education, and democratic governance.
In addition to his academic work, he has served as a consultant and advisor to a range of international organizations and research institutions on issues related to governance, education, migration, and democratic development. He is a past member of the ACSS Board of Trustees and currently a member of the Board of Directors of the North American Arab Council for the Social Sciences. A frequent speaker at international conferences and policy forums, he is widely recognized for his contributions to debates on history, politics, and social transformation in North Africa and the Arab world.
Mounir Saidani received his PhD in Sociology in 2001 and is a Professor of Sociology. He taught Cultural Anthropology, Sociology of Culture, Anthropology of Cultural Practices, Sociology of Intercultural Communication, and Sociology of Literature and Art at Tunisian universities from 2000 to 2022. He also served as a full-time researcher at the Centre for Economic and Social Research and Studies (CERES), Tunisia (2022–2023).
He has held numerous leadership and advisory roles in the social sciences, including membership on the Scientific Council of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies–Tunisia since 2020 and the Board of Trustees of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences since 2023. He served on the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association (2018–2023) and on the Editorial Board of Global Dialogue (2010–2023). Since November 2023, he has been an Editor of Current Sociology, and since August 2023 he has served as Editor-in-Chief of Omran: Journal of Social Sciences. He previously served as Editor-in-Chief of the Tunisian Journal of Social Sciences (2021–2023).
His research focuses on sociology, culture, social change, and knowledge production. He has served on numerous national and international scientific committees and has reviewed books and scholarly articles for academic institutions and journals published in Arabic, French, and English. He has also translated major scholarly works in sociology from French and English into Arabic.
He is the author of numerous books and dozens of scholarly articles published in Arabic, French, and English.
Nisreen Salti is an associate professor of economics at the American University of Beirut. She works on development, labor, and political economy. Her research is on inequality and inequity in resources, access, and outcomes, with a focus on health. She is especially interested in marginalized communities, particularly refugees, including their health and labor market outcomes. She is a founding member of the Labor and Equity Lab at the Department of Economics at AUB and the Critical Ecologies Lab in the Mediterranean East at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Seteney Shami is founding Director-General of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) since 2012. She is an anthropologist from Jordan and obtained her BA from the American University of Beirut and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She has conducted fieldwork in Jordan, Egypt, Türkiye, and the North Caucasus. After teaching at Yarmouk University, Jordan, she moved to the Population Council in Cairo. She then joined the SSRC in New York as director of the Middle East and North Africa program and the Eurasia program. She also developed the InterAsia Partnership program hosted by the SSRC until 2021 and currently hosted by the ACSS. Her publications include Gendering the Cultural Histories of the Modern Arab World (co-edited with Hoda Elsadda); Seeing the World: How US Universities make knowledge in a Global Era (co-authored with M. Stevens and C. Miller-Idriss) Princeton University Press 2018; and “South and North, East and West: Knowledge Circulations and Connections in a Disordered World” In Thinking the Re-Thinking of the World (eds. K. Kresse and A. Sounaye).
