Bio: political scientist and senior researcher at Centre National du Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). He is a director of a program When Authoritarianism Fails in the Arab World of the European Research Council (ERC) (WAFAA). He has been a permanent resident in the Middle East and North Africa region for over 22 years; University of Constantine in Algeria (1973-1980); Cairo’s French Centre d’Études et de Documentation Économique Juridique et Sociale (CEDEJ) from 1989 to1993; and as Director of the French Center for Archeology and Social Sciences in Sanaa (1997-2003). He is the author of The Islamic Movement in North Africa (University of Texas Press), and Face to Face with Political Islam (IB Tauris) and Islamism in the shadow of al Qaeda (Univ of Texas Press).

Bio: Born in 1980, Laurent Bonnefoy is a CNRS research fellow (CR1) at the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CERI – Sciences Po) since January 2013. He is deputy principal investigator of WAFAW project. In the framework of the project, he focuses primarily on the dynamics of politicization within the Salafi movements, in particular in the Arabian Peninsula.

He submitted a Ph.D. in International relations under the supervision of Bertrand Badie in October 2007 at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris. He was later a researcher and branch director at the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo) between September 2010 and December 2012 in the Palestinian Territories.Salafism in Yemen. Transnationalism and Religious Identity

A result of extensive field work in various regions of Yemen, his doctoral thesis focused on contemporary transnational religious relations between Yemen and Saudi Arabia. This research was particularly interested in the development and adaptation of the Salafi movement in the context of Yemen, where it is widely seen as exogenous.

Between November 2007 and June 2009, post-doc in the ANR project «From the Persian Gulf to Europe: between violence and counter-violence», headed by François Burgat, he continued my fieldwork in the Arabian Peninsula by focusing in particular on the roots of political violence and on Islamist militant trajectories.

His book, Salafism in Yemen. Transnationalism and Religious Identity, was published in late 2011 by Hurst & Co. and Columbia University Press. He also co-edited two volumes, one being a special issue of The MuslimWorld (2011) on violence in the Gulf region, the other Yémen. Le tournant révolutionnaire (2012) published by Karthala.

Bio: Matthieu Rey is a Professor Assistant in Collège de France (Paris). He holds a PhD in history from the EHESS (Paris).
His research focuses on the political system in Iraq and Syria as case studies to understand processes of policy-building and state-building in the Middle East during the 1950s. He examines the political engineering of power. He intends to publish a book on the parliamentary system in Iraq and Syria between 1946 and 1963 and a monograph on Syria. He was a doctoral fellow in the Institut Français du Proche Orient (Ifpo) in Damascus between 2009 and 2013, and then, a research fellow at the Middle East Institute (Singapore).

He is also fluent in Arabic. Apart from his main research, he has delivered talks and published articles on elections in the Middle East, development policies, the Cold War, and the ‘Arab spring’.

Bio: Claire Beaugrand joined the Institut Français du Proche Orient (Ifpo) in Jerusalem in June 2013 after working as Gulf Senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, where she covered the Bahrain’s political deadlock. Since then, her researches focus on the Gulf investment policies, their rationale and articulation with aid programs in Palestine.
She is one of the core team members of the European research Council-funded WAFAW (When Authoritarianism Fails in the Arab World) project. Having worked and published on the trajectories of Bahraini exiles, she leads together with Vincent Geisser, the WAFAW program on “Diasporas and Arab revolutions and transitions”.

Claire wrote her PhD thesis in International Relations at the London School of Economics, a work that investigated the emergence and persistence of statelessness in Kuwait and will be published by IB. Tauris under the title Stateless in the Gulf: Migration, Nationality and Society in Kuwait.

Her research focuses on issues of nationality, transnational networks, political exiles and social margins as entry points to understand the evolution of internal and external.

Bio: Born in 1981, Nicolas Dot-Pouillard is Researcher in Political Sciences at the Institut français pour le Proche-Orient (Ifpo, Beirut, Lebanon), since October 2011. He submitted his PhD, focused on the relations between Leftist and Islamist Movements in the Lebanese and Palestinian political fields, in 2009 at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), under the supervision of Olivier Roy.NDotPouillard-Couv-Tunisie
Between 2009 and 2011, he has been successively Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI, Firenze, Italia), Professor in Political Sciences at the Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik (USEK, Lebanon), and Senior Analyst for the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Tunisia.

He has collaborated with several academic and scientific Journals and Magazines, in French, Arabic or English, such as L’Année du Maghreb, The Muslim World or al-Marasid. He is a regular contributor to French and international monthly Newspaper Le Monde diplomatique. His book, Tunisie : la révolution et ses passés, has been published in February 2013 by the Institut de recherche Méditerranée Moyen Orient (Iremmo/ L’Harmattan).

His research and his field work for the WAFAW Project mainly concern the transformations of the Leftist and Arab nationalist spectrum, especially in its relationships, talks, alliances and/or oppositions with Islamist Movements in the Middle East and North Africa, in the current context of Arab Uprisings and recompositions of the political landscape.

Bio: Born in 1968, Vincent Geisser is a political scientist and a research fellow (CR1) at the CNRS based at the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Beirut) since September 2011. He is the president of the Centre d’information et d’études sur les migrations internationales (CIEMI, Paris) since April 2005 and editor of Migrations Société review. He is also a member of the editorial committee of L’Année du Maghreb (CNRS Editions).

He has authored more than fifty articles and papers on a wide range of subjects dealing with ethnicity, Muslim migrations in France and Europe, Islamophobia, the Tunisian political system or authoritarianism in the Arab world.

In the framework of the WAFAW project, he focuses primarily on “Gender and Politics in the Arab World”, “Islamism and democratic transition in Tunisia” and “Diasporas and Arab revolutions”.

Between 1995 and 2008, Vincent Geisser managed a scientific program on Arab authoritarian political systems, focusing particularly on Tunisia. He developed the concept of “democratic authoritarianism” and “authoritarian democracy”, highlighting phenomena of “political hybridization”. In this perspective, he published two volumes Le syndrome autoritaire. Politique en Tunisie de Bourguiba à Ben Ali (Presses de Sciences Po, 2003, with Michel Camau), and Autoritarismes démocratiques et démocraties autoritaires au XXIe siècle (La Découverte, 2008, edited with Olivier Dabène and Gilles Massardier).

Vincent Geisser has also developed his research on the phenomena of racism in France against the Arab and Islamic populations. He is the first researcher to have conceptualized “new Islamophobia” in Europe. He has published three books on this subject: La nouvelle islamophobie (La Découverte, 2003, translated into Arabic, Polish and Turkish.), Marianne et Allah Les politiques français face à la « question musulmane » (La Découverte, 2007) and Discriminer pour mieux régner. Enquête sur la diversité dans les partis politiques français (L’Atelier, 2008).

With Moncef Marzouki (current President of the Republic of Tunisia), Vincent Geisser has published a book that anticipated much of the Arab revolutions: Dictateurs en sursis. La revanche des peules arabes (L’Atelier, 2009).

His most recent book is Renaissance arabe. 7 questions sur des révolutions en marche (L’Atelier, 2011 with Michaël Béchir Ayari).

Bio: Sari Hanafi is currently a Professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut and editor of Idafat: the Arab Journal of Sociology (Arabic). He is also a member of the Executive Bureau of the International Association of Sociology and of the Arab Sociological Association. He holds a Ph. D. in Sociology from the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales-Paris, where he wrote his thesis entitled “Les ingénieurs en Syrie. Modernisation, technobureaucratie et identité” (1994).

He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Poitiers (Migrinter-France), University of Bologna and Ravenna (Italy) and visiting fellow in CMI (Bergen-Norway). S. Hanafi was also the former Director of the Palestinian Refugee and Diaspora Centre (Shaml) from 2000 to 2004 and a former senior research at the Cairo-based French research center, Centre d’études et de documentation économique juridique et sociale (CEDEJ) from 1994 to 2000. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on the political and economic sociology of the Palestinian diaspora and refugees; sociology of migration; transnationalism; politics of scientific research; civil society and elite formation and transitional justice.

Among his recent books are: The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in The Occupied Palestinian Territories (Edited with A. Ophir & M. Givoni, 2009) (English and Arabic) (New-York: Zone Books; Beirut: CAUS), The Emergence of A Palestinian Globalized Elite: Donors, International Organizations and Local NGOs (Edited with L. Taber, 2005) (Arabic and English) and Pouvoir et associations dans le monde arabe (Edited with S. Bennéfissa, 2002) (Paris: CNRS). In addition to his academic work, he has served as a consultant to the UN, the World Bank, and other organizations.

Bio: Salwa Ismail is Professor of Politics with reference to the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research focuses on everyday forms of government, urban governance and the politics of space. She has published widely on Islamist politics and on state-society relations in the Middle East. She is the author of Rethinking Islamist Politics: Culture, the State and Islamism (I.B Tauris 2003 & 2006), and Political Life in Cairo’s New Quarters: Encountering the Everyday State (University of Minnesota Press 2006). Her recent publications have appeared in Third World Quarterly 2011, Social Research 2012, Contemporary Islam 2013.Political Life in Cairo's New Quarters: Encountering the Everyday State (University of Minnesota Press 2006)

Ismail’s research and writing is based on extensive fieldwork conducted primarily in Egypt and Syria. Ethnographic in approach, her work inquires into the micro practices of government and rule and their spatial dimensions. She is the recipient of a number of research awards from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK. Between 2003 and 2006, she held a three-year ESRC Research Fellowship for her project on the changing political and social reconfigurations of Cairo and Damascus under authoritarian rule over the last four decades. Most recently, she completed an ESRC-funded research project on the political economy of public piety, with a particular focus on Egypt.

Bio: Myriam Catusse is a political scientist and a CNRS research fellow (CR1) at the Institut de recherche sur le monde arabe et musulman (IREMAM, Aix-en-Provence) since 2000. Since September 2013, she heads the department of contemporary studies at the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo). She holds a PhD from Sciences-Po Aix-en-Provence (1999) and was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute of Florence (Italy). She teaches for MBA Students at Aix-Marseille University and Sciences-Po Aix and also taught at the Paris School for International Affairs. She was earlier a PhD student at Centre Jacques Berque in Rabat (Morocco) (1996-1999) and was researcher at the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo) between April 2006 and October 2010 in Lebanon.

She is a board member of Politique africaine, L’Année du Maghreb and the Revue des mondes musulmans et de la méditerranée. She is, with Stéphanie Latte, the head of the Social sciences department of the IREMAM.MCatusse-Couv-Entrepreneurs

From 2008 to 2011, she led an ANR-funded (Agence nationale de la recherche) team project called “TANMIA (Development: the fabric of public action in the Middle East?)” and, before that was team leader of a joint French Ministry of Foreign Affairs/CNRS project on “States Facing Social Issue in Maghreb” (2005-2008). She coordinated with Karam Karam and Olfa Lamloum the research programme Mobilizing and voting. The Lebanese parliamentary elections of June 2009, with the Lebanese Center for Policies Studies (Beirut) and the National Democratic Institute, and was a member of the research Program Political Parties’ Development in the Arab World, with the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (Beirut) and the International Development Research Center (Ottawa).

Her research focuses mainly on social issues and mobilizations in the Middle East. She edited and co-edited books on Moroccan Businessmen (2008), on Moroccan (2004) and Lebanese elections (2011), on political parties in Maghreb (2005) and Middle East (2010) and on social issues (2005, 2010, 2010) (see her bibliography on hal-shs).

In the framework of the WAFAW project, she focuses primarily on the dynamics of politicization and depolitization of “social issues”, questioning the resurgence of “dangerous classes” debates, on local moral economy and clientelist dynamics.

Bio: Dilek Yankaya is a WAFAW post-doctoral researcher and the author of New Islamic Bourgeoisie: the Turkish model (2013). Her book was distinguished by the Comité France – Turkey for the literary award of 2013 and edited in Turkish in 2014.
New Islamic Bourgeoisie: the Turkish model (2013)She got her PhD degree in political sciences from Sciences Po Paris, with her dissertation on “The formation of the new Islamic bourgeoisie in Turkey: the case of Müsiad” (2011). Based on a field work with conservative businessmen in Istanbul and Anatolian cities, her doctoral thesis presented the mobilization of Islamic identity in favor of upward social mobility and political consolidation as well as the innovation of the management patterns of SMEs.

Author or coauthor of articles in Governance and European Journal of Turkish Studies, she had been involved in many international research projects on Muslim communities. She teaches at Sciences Po Paris and coordinates the graduate seminar on “The New Muslim Business Ethics: a multidisciplinary approach” at the Institute for studies on Islam and Muslim world societies (IISMM) in Paris.

Her WAFAW post-doctoral project deals with the dynamics of Turkish businessmen’s economic activism within the Muslim world and its implications on the reconfiguration of the power relations in the Middle East as well on the emergence of a new Islamic spirit of capitalism.

Bio: Born in 1983, Marie Vannetzel is Post-doc researcher at the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CERI-Sciences Po). She completed her PhD in Political science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris in September 2012, under the supervision of Jean-Louis Briquet and Sarah Ben Nefissa. Based on extensive field work in three areas of Greater Cairo between 2005 and 2010, her doctoral thesis focused on the daily activities of members of parliament in the last years of Mubarak’s rule and on processes of electoral mobilization and politicization.

She has been granted a research fellowship from the French Ministry of research and higher education in 2007, and has been teaching as Associate Tutor (ATER) at Paris 13 University from 2011 to 2013. She has published several book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals of political sociology including Politix (translated in English), Politique Africaine, or Revue internationale de politique comparée.

In the frame of the WAFAW Project, her research focuses on the recompositions of local politics, electoral dynamics and political identities in the context of the revolutionary process in Egypt.

Bio: Laura Ruiz de Elvira is a post-doctoral researcher at the IREMAM (CNRS UMR 7310). She completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at the EHESS (Paris) and the UAM (Madrid) in 2013, under the supervision of Hamit Bozarslan and Bernabé Lopez Garcia. Based on extensive fieldwork carried out between 2007 and 2010, her dissertation, Associations de bienfaisance et ingénieries politiques dans la Syrie de Bachar al-Assad : Émergence d’une société civile autonome et retrait de l’Etat ? [Charities and political engineering in Bashar al-Asad’s Syria: the rise of an autonomous civil society and the retreat of the state?], on which she was awarded the Syrian Studies Association’s 2014 Dissertation Prize, analyzes the political engineering of Bashar al-Asad’s regime as well as the unraveling of the old social contract through the prism of charitable action.
Before joining WAFAW, she was a doctoral fellow in the Institut Français du Proche Orient (Ifpo) in Damascus (2007-2009) and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Philipps University of Marburg (2013-2015), where she taught two graduate seminars.

She is the author, together with Tina Zintl, of Civil Society and the State in Syria: The Outsourcing of Social Responsibility (Lynne Rienner, 2012). She has also written several book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Revista Española de Ciencia Política, Maghreb-Machrek and A Contrario.

In the frame of the WAFAW project her research will focus on the recompositions of and the interactions between charitable/humanitarian activism, collective action, politics and religiosity in post-2011 Syria.

She is fluent in Syrian dialect, French and English and has been part of several international research projects.

Bio: Loulouwa Al Rachid has been researching the politics of Iraq and the Gulf region for the past 20 years. Prior to joigning WAFAW, she was a Senior Iraq Analyst with the International Crisis Group and a consultant for numerous governmental institutions in France and Europe.
She has carried out extensive fieldwork in Iraq both before and after regime change in 2003. She completed her PhD in Political Science at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris; her dissertation “L’Irak de l’embargo à l’occupation : dépérissement d’un ordre politique (1990-2003)” explored the erosion of authoritarianism and survival strategies in the final decade of Baathi Iraq.

She has written several book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Middle Eastern Studies, Maghreb-Machrek, A Contrario, Critique internationale, Tumultes, Politique étrangère, and Politique internationale.

In the frame of the WAFAW project, her research will focus on: a) Militia “entrepreneurship” in the Levant and, b) Tribalism and jihadism in Iraq.

Bio: Born in 1978, Julien Pélissier is a post-doctoral Researcher in Islamic studies at the IREMAM (Aix-en-Provence), since January 2014. He submitted his PhD, focused on the theorization of Islamic economic doctrine by Iraqi thinker Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr, in December 2009 at the Université de Toulouse.
Droit Musulman - Ecole Ahl-Ul-BaytBetween 2010 and 2013, he has been a lecturer at the Tehran University for courses related to Islamic law and economics. In 2010, he was awarded a research grant by the British academy and Brismes within the “Hawza project” scheme under the supervision of Prof.Gleave from Exeter University’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies.

He has collaborated with several academic and scientific Journals and Magazines, such as “Global Islamic Finance”. He contributed to the republication of the translation by Amédée Querry (1872) of a 13th century legal compendium “Les règles juridiques de l’Islam sur les questions du licite et de l’illicite” authored by Muhaqqiq al-Hilli (Paris : Al-Bouraq, 2011, 916p) and wrote its introduction.

His research and his field work for the WAFAW Project mainly concern the economic project of Islamist trends in the current context of Arab Uprisings and changes of the political landscape. It aims at understanding related economic ideas in calling up history of ideas, Islamic studies and economic approaches.

Bio: Monica Marks is a DPhil candidate at St Antony’s College, Oxford University. Ms. Marks’s doctoral research is an internal political ethnography of Ennahda, Tunisia’s largest Islamist party. Her research examines points of unity and of tension within the party, comparing perspectives of national, mid-level, and local leadership with rank-and-file members of the party’s base, both inside and outside the capital, Tunis. The research has especially interesting implications for issues of transitional justice, institutional reform, and questions of ideology vs. politics in times of tense transition.

Her broader analytical work, which focuses mainly on Islamism, youth politics, and security reform in Tunisia, has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, and the Huffington Post, as well as in peer-reviewed books and academic journals. She is a regular contributor to think tanks, including the Carnegie Endowment and the Brookings Institute, which published her most recent report, “Convince, Coerce, or Compromise? Ennahda’s Approach to Tunisia’s Constitution” in February, 2014. As lead researcher for the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), a Barcelona-based think tank, Ms. Marks drafted “Inside the Transition Bubble,” an exhaustive mapping analysis that assessed international assistance provision to four key sectors of Tunisia’s transition. A former Fulbright Scholar to Turkey, Marks returned there to teach at Istanbul’s Bogazici University in summer 2013 and summer 2014. Since 2012, she has been based primarily in Tunisia, where she has also worked as a freelance journalist for the New York Times.

Bio: Xavier Guignard is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Paris Pantheon Sorbonne University, where he is finishing a thesis on the emergence of a Palestinian diplomacy.
His research focuses on institution building and policy making in a colonial and authoritarian context.

In 2012 and 2013, he was based at the Institut français du Proche Orient (Ifpo) in Jerusalem as a recipient of a full PhD scholarship. In 2014, he was appointed Visiting Assistant Professor at Al-Quds Bard Honors College (Abu Dis, Palestine).

Before joining the WAFAW program late 2015, he was a part-time lecturer at Sciences Po Paris.

Since 2010, he conducted extensive fieldwork in Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan. He now resides between Paris and Amman.

Bio: A graduate from the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS, Paris), Robin Beaumont is pursuing a PhD in Political studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris), focusing on sectarian dynamics in contemporary Iraq and Syria, under the supervision of Hamit Bozarslan and Sabrina Mervin.

Robin holds a Masters in International Relations from the Paris Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po).

He studied Arabic at the French Institute for the Near East (IFPO) in Damascus, Syria, and interned at various state institutions and NGOs (International Crisis Group in Cairo).

Before embarking on his PhD within the frame of the WAFAW program, he taught courses on contemporary Middle Eastern politics at ENS.

Bio: Stéphanie Latte Abdallah is a historian and political scientist. She is a research fellow at the Institut de recherches et d’études sur le monde arabe et musulman (CR1 IREMAM-CNRS) in Aix-en-Provence since 2006 and at the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo) since September 2013. She first specialized in Palestinian refugee social history; then on more broader issues of gender, civil society mobilizations, more specifically in Jordan and Palestine, and feminisms in the Middle East, notably on Islamic feminism. She then coordinated collective research programs on borders in the Israeli-Palestinian spaces and is researching on political imprisonment of Palestinians in Israel since 1967. She is also working on the connection between images and politics in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She was awarded the Bronze Medal of the CNRS in 2008.41TfeudHIdL

Among her main publications are Femmes réfugiées palestiniennes PUF, Paris, 2006 ; (ed.), Images aux frontières. Représentations et constructions sociales et politique. Palestine, Jordanie 1948-2000, Beyrouth, Institut Français du Proche-Orient (IFPO), 2005 ; (ed.) Le féminisme islamique aujourd’hui, Critique Internationale, n°46, janvier-mars 2010 [Islamic feminism today, Issue updated and translated in English, 2013, available on the website of Critique Internationale, www.sciencespo.fr/ceri/en/critique] ; (ed.) Féminismes islamiques, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée (REMMM), n°128-2, décembre 2010 ; (co-edited with Leyla Dakhli), Des engagements féminins au Moyen-Orient (XXe-XXIe siècle), Le Mouvement Social, n° 231, avril-juin 2010.

Her latest book (co-edited with Cédric Parizot) A l’ombre du Mur. Israéliens et Palestiniens entre occupation et séparation was published in September 2011.

In the framework of the WAFAW program, she focuses on the impact and roles of Islamic women activists and eventually of Islamic feminists in the post revolutionary period at the regional level. She will first deal more specifically with the Jordanian process and then extend it to other countries of the region. She will also consider more broadly the transformations of mobilizations in Jordan and in the Palestinian territories (from party politics to pragmatic networks and coalitions often superseding ideological and secular/religious lines), including a gender perspective, and the impact of the revolutionary processes in the region on Palestinian politics and on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Bio: Stéphane Lacroix is an associate professor of political science at Sciences Po, a researcher at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI), and an associate fellow at the Centre d’Etudes et de Documentation Economiques, Juridiques et Sociales (CEDEJ) in Cairo. He is also a lecturer at Chicago University in Paris, and was previously a post-doctoral scholar at Stanford University.
Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi ArabiaHe works on political Islam and is particularly interested in the management of the religious sphere by authoritarian regimes. His research focuses on Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

He has written for academic journals such as the Middle East Journal, the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and the Journal of Democracy, and for edited volumes (most recently Asef Bayat (ed.), Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam, Oxford University Press, 2013; and Lina Khatib, Ellen Lust-Okar (eds.), Taking to the Streets: Activism and the Arab Uprisings, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

He is the author of “Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia” (Harvard University Press, 2011), also available in French and Arabic. He is about to co-author two edited volumes: “L’Egypte en revolution(s)” (Presses Universitaires de France, with Bernard Rougier) and “Saudi Arabia in Transition: Insights on Social, Political, Economic and Religious Change” (Cambridge University Press, with Bernard Haykel and Thomas Hegghammer).