The ACSS conference is usually held in Lebanon, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the format was changed to ensure the safety of all participants. The conference was divided into three in-person, one-day events, each held in a different city across the region: Casablanca (December 2), Cairo (December 7) and Beirut (December 10). In Morocco, the Conference was held in partnership with Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane and Hassan II University, in Rabat; and in Egypt with the American University in Cairo. In addition, the ACSS focal points organized virtual roundtables focusing on Palestine and Algeria. Applications were received from 30 countries across the globe and one hundred and fifty researchers (in the three countries) from all over the Arab region and the world presented their papers.

To launch the conference, distinguished author, Ibrahim El-Kouni, delivered the keynote speech under the title of “Interrogating the Concept of Change”. The session was facilitated by prominent journalist and Moroccan TV figure, Adnan Yassin. In Cairo, the opening session was presented by Dr. Ahmad Dallal, AUC President, and the author of the Third Arab Social Science Report entitled “The Academic Universes of Social Scientists in the Arab World: Career Trajectories and Networks in Universities”. Finally, the Beirut opening session was a plenary on the theme of the fifth conference in which three members of the organizing committee (Drs. Mounir Saadani, Ziad Abu Rish and Haider Saeed) served as panelists. The panel was facilitated by Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Chair of the ACSS BoT. This concluding panel also served as the 10th and final webinar of the ACSS 10th anniversary series.

The years 2019 and 2020 represent a distinctive and historical moment for the peoples of the Arab region, as was the case for 2010-2011, given the significant popular and political movements arising in several countries of both the Mashreq and Maghreb. A number of social forces have emerged, or were enhanced, through social and protest movements that took on a variety of forms and used various means of expression. These collective and radical movements demanded changes in the apparatuses of the state, accused ruling political elites of ignoring the intellectual, political, cultural and demographic transformations of their societies, and called for new relations among citizens themselves as well as with their national state. The protests demanded change concerning numerous structural problems as the region entered into a vortex of new crises, including issues of citizenship, socio-economic policy choices, social inequality, unequal access to social services, and the aggravation of problems related to environmental and natural resources. Furthermore, it has been remarkable to see the emergence of simultaneous movements and protests that reference one another, not just across the region, but also globally from East Asia to Latin America, on forms and expressions of resistance as well as imaginations of a different future.

Infrastructure in cities, villages, the countryside, deserts and coastal areas, are not just physical structures but rather a human intervention aimed at engineering nature and rehabilitating living spaces, which defines to a great extent the modes and styles of life for individuals and groups. Accordingly, infrastructure is linked to survival, in the sense of achieving the conditions of physical existence for present generations and sustaining life for later generations. It is also connected to basic human and gender rights, including sustainable and productive health, education, decent housing, decent and fair-waged employment, and community participation. All these dimensions fall within the framework of the concept of sustainable development and call for the interrogation of related concepts such as resilience, fragility, well-being and social protection. Hence, from the perspective of the social sciences, achieving the necessary conditions of physical existence and sustaining life is not a natural matter, but is rather at the core of public policies that entail planning and implementation strategies. Thus, infrastructures have a dual relationship with development plans in the sense that they themselves are part of development, but at the same time, stimulate and facilitate development. Accordingly, a distinction could be made between policies of establishing infrastructures according to the type of existing economies in each country and the locations of investment and development on one hand, and the extent to which these policies achieve equity and justice on the other.