Dr Wassim Mroue
IASH-Alwaleed Postdoctoral Fellow, October 2022-May 2023
I am interested in intra-sectarian relations during and after civil wars, conflict and peace, Shiism and political Islam. I earned a PhD in politics from the University of Edinburgh in December 2021. My thesis looked into drivers of relations between Lebanon’s Shia Islamist parties AMAL and Hezbollah in the 1980s. Before pursuing my PhD, I worked as a journalist and a national editor at Lebanon’s English language newspaper The Daily Star.
Project Title: Drivers of Intra-Sectarian Relations in Civil Wars: A De-colonial Reading of Shia Politics in Lebanon
Analysing press archives and in-person interviews, the project employs a de-colonial lens to study intra-Shia politics during Lebanon’s civil war. It seeks to provide a better understanding of Hezbollah’s and AMAL’s Islamic discourse and ideology of revolutionary Shiism as drivers of their relationship with particular focus on cooperation. The project provides a better understanding of Lebanon’s Shia community, showing how heterogeneous and far from being monolithic it is. Avoiding the Eurocentric concept of a nation-state, my research treats armed political movements during civil wars as unitary actors interacting with states in one anarchic system.