Joseph Daher addresses the challenges of Lebanon’s popular protest and the dilemma faced by Hezbollah

11 February 2020 | Press release

Author of Hezbollah: The Political Economy of Lebanon’s Party of God (2016), Joseph Daher offers this Thursday (6.30pm) the conference “Hezbollah and the Lebanese popular movement”.

Popular protests against corruption and the political system have been shaking Lebanon since October 2019. The criticism in the streets is also reaching Hezbollah, the powerful Shiite party born in the 1980s, which has traditionally enjoyed unwavering support of a wide sector of the population.

Joseph Daher, professor of Political Science at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) will talk on Thursday at 6.30 about the perspectives of the popular movement and the political behavior of Hezbollah in the face of the demands of the street.

Doctor in Development Studies from the London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (2015) and in Political Science from the University of Lausanne (2018), Daher is also a Swiss-Syrian socialist activist, founder of the blog Syria Freedom Forever, dedicated to the popular protest against the Bashar al-Asad regime, and author of Syria After the Uprisings: The Political Economy of State Resilience (2019). A book in which he denounces that the neoliberal approach of the Damascus regime in the country’s reconstruction process deepens the inequalities that gave rise to the 2011 protests that degenerated into civil war.

Montserrat Arbós, academic coordinator of the Humanities Area, URL-Blanquerna and professor of the Master in International Journalism, with whom the IEMed co-organizes the conference within the framework of the Aula Mediterrània 2019-2020 cycle, will present the session.

The Aula Mediterrània 2019-2020 cycle of conferences is a collaboration of the IEMed with 13 university master’s degrees and offers 25 conferences on key issues of the contemporary Mediterranean between the months of October 2019 and May 2020.