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Rola el-Husseini is a research associate professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has previously held positions at Texas A&M University and at Yale University. Her research interests include Lebanese and Syrian politics, political Islam, Iran, and Arab Shi’ism.
Her work has appeared in Contemporary Study of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, TheMiddle East Journal, Orient, and Third World Quarterly in addition to several edited volumes. She is the author of Pax Syriana: Elite Politics in Postwar Lebanon(Syracuse University Press, 2012), which analyzes events in Lebanon from 1989 to 2011, with a primary focus on the period of Syrian institutionalized influence (1990-2005.) She has recently started a new research project on Lebanese Sunni Islamists in the age of ISIS.
As fears of an ISIS surge in northern Lebanon continue to rise, it is important to have a balanced perspective on the makeup of current Lebanese Sunni Islamist groups. I recently spent three months conducting fieldwork in Lebanon, interviewing representatives from a wide variety of Islamist groups. I present my findings below.
