Raphaël Lefèvre, “The ‘Islamic Emirate’ of North Lebanon”, a dissertation submitted to the Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University, and accepted in September 2016.
Raphaël Lefèvre’s dissertation is a thoroughly researched political sociology of the ‘Islamic emirate’ established by the Movement of Islamic Unification, or Tawheed, in Tripoli. In intricate detail, the author explores how specific socio-economic groups living in Tripoli during the Lebanese civil war were mobilized to support Tawheed’s very particular form of Islamism. Among this dissertation’s many strengths are its integration of multiple methodologies in the social sciences and its wide and innovative use of primary sources. Integrating urban sociology with the more standard studies of Islamist political ideology, Lefèvre is able to deliver a richly textured portrait of the urban fabric that made the Tawheed movement successful for a time, while also accounting for the forces that led to its downfall. Combining an impressive array of press sources and institutional records in Arabic, French and English with dozens of interviews, the author provides a wealth of documentation for his conclusions. Situated within wider scholarly debates about the nature of Islamist movements, this dissertation moves the field away from excessive focus on the ideology of these groups towards a more nuanced approach that considers how such ideology intersects with the priorities of discrete urban groups. Such a contribution has much to offer not only to specialists and academics, but also to the broader public discourse about Islamist movements.