Rana B. Khoury - "Civilizing Contention: International Aid in Syria's War" - Lisa Wedeen

Rana B. Khoury will discuss Civilizing Contention: International Aid in Syria's War. She will be joined in conversation by Lisa Wedeen. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. About the book: In Civilizing Contention, Rana B. Khoury asserts that to understand civilian and refugee activism in war, we must regard the international actors and organizations that enter the scene to help. When these organizations respond to crises, they work with local actors. In so doing, they facilitate the activists' participation in something like a civil society even in the depths of war. Yet as aid imposes its structures and routines, it also leaves activists unprotected from the violence of war and its aftermaths. Khoury pursues these ideas through analysis of Syria's war that emerged from the 2011 Arab Uprisings. She traces the afterlife of a social movement that did not merely take up arms or capitulate to repression. Interviews with Syrian activists and international aid workers in Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon provide insight into action among actors in the war, while original social-media data offers additional evidence. Civilizing Contention deepens knowledge of civilian and refugee agency by explaining how ordinary people act in extraordinary ways in a world structured by powerful forces. About the author: Rana B. Khoury is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University and M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. Rana’s research interests include contention, displacement, and humanitarianism in the Middle East, as well as qualitative and multi-method research. Her research has been published in Perspectives on Politics, World Development, Journal of Democracy, Middle East Law and Governance, and Forced Migration Review, and her writing can also be found in volumes on qualitative research and Middle East politics, as well as in outlets for general readerships including The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and Lapham’s Quarterly. Prior to her graduate studies, Rana studied Arabic in Damascus, Syria, where she also volunteered for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees and gained her interest in the politics of displacement. Her first book, As Ohio Goes: Life in the Post-Recession Nation, was published by Kent State University Press in 2016 and received an Independent Publishers Book Award (“IPPY”) for current events. Her new book, Civilizing Contention: International Aid in Syria’s War, received the Best Book Award for a junior scholar from the American Political Science Association's Section on Middle East and North Africa Politics in 2026. About the interlocutor: Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College and Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. She is also Associate Faculty in Anthropology. Her publications include three books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; with a new preface, 2015); Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (2008); and Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019). Among her articles are the following: “Conceptualizing ‘Culture’: Possibilities for Political Science” (2002); “Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy” (2004); “Ethnography as an Interpretive Enterprise” (2009); “Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science” (2010); “Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria” (2013); and “Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism, and Empire: American Political Science in the Modern Middle East” (2016). She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship. For Authoritarian Apprehensions, she received the American Political Science Association’s Charles Taylor Book Award (2020), sponsored by the Interpretative Methodologies and Methods group; the APSA’s inaugural Middle East and North Africa Politics Section’s best book award (2020); the IPSA award for Concept Analysis in Political Science (2021); and the Gordon J. Laing Award (2022), given annually for the book that brings the most distinction to the University of Chicago Press. She has completed an edited volume with Joseph Masco entitled Conspiracy/Theory (Duke University Press, 2024); she is in the process of coediting an Oxford University Handbook, with Prathama Banerjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sanjay Seth, tentatively entitled Reimagining Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press); and, with Aarjen Glas and Jessica Soedirgo, the interpretive methods part of an Oxford University Handbook on Methodological Pluralism in Political Science (edited by Janet Box-Steffensmeier et al.). Wedeen is also beginning work on a mono