Susann KASSEM

Dr Susann Kassem is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellow. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the Geneva Graduate Institute, an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the American University of Beirut, and a BA in European Ethnology and Area Studies Asia/Africa from Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She previously held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, the University of Oxford. Before that she was a Sasakawa Peace Foundation Fellow and Postdoctoral Research Officer at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. Her current research project uses methods of oral history and historical ethnography to explore the formation of political subjectivities during the multiple reorganizations of everyday life and forced migrations under the shifting borders and systems of rule in south Lebanese frontier villages. Her book project The Global North in the South of Lebanon: The Practices of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanonexamines the role of international peace interventions in the post-Cold War era. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in rural south Lebanon between 2009–19, it tracks how UN peacekeeping merges military activities with civilian practices of economic, civic, and cultural engagement in an attempt to implement an idealized political order in the former colonial world.

Research and expertise: Modern Middle East; ethnography; development; colonialism; military intervention; peacekeeping; war and peace; politics, religion and sectarianism; borders; the state; displacement; sovereignty; and migration.