Thesiss

This dissertation is based on twenty-one months of ethnographic fieldwork in Damascus and Suwyada, Syria. Research focused on the Druze religious sect. The central focus is on a religious minority’s strategies for preserving their sense of separateness and uniqueness while at th…

Eric Hobsbawm argues that recently created nations in the Middle East, such as Israel or Jordan, must be novel. In most instances, these new nations and nationalism that goes along with them have been constructed through what Hobsbawm refers to as “invented traditions.” This the…

The Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) witnessed military conflicts between the major religious communities, including Christians and Druze. It resulted in the displacement of a third of the population into religiously homogenous areas. One of the major goals of International Develo…

This work fills an important gap in the literature on Syria, for no study in English devotes more than 30 pages to the first five years of Syrian independence. I argue that bitter sectional and communal competition, not class warfare, undermined Syria's fragile political center …

In 2018, Israel passed the Basic Law, or more commonly known as the nation-state bill, explicitly stating that Israel is exclusively the state of Jewish people and that national self-determination in Israel is unique to Jews. While some revered the bill for being crucial in a ti…