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Living memories and State archives: A false absence. Top civil servants and scotomisation of public archives in Lebanon

Mémoires vivantes et archives d’État : la fausse absence. Élites politico-administratives et scotomisation des archives publiques au Liban
الذاكرة الحية ومحفوظات الدولة: غياب غير حقيقي. كبار الموظفين الحكوميين والتعتيم على المحفوظات العامة في لبنان
Pierre France
p. 123-135

Résumés

Contrairement à ce qui est souvent avancé, les archives publiques au Liban ne sont pas seulement abandonnées ou (rendues) indisponibles par l’État, par une décision au plus haut niveau ou par l’absence d’une décision dans un état jugé sans direction. Elles sont aussi, de manière plus pratique, situées à des endroits connus de seuls initiés : chez des anciens grands commis d’État, devenus “mémoires vivantes” et “archivistes sauvages” de leurs institutions, gardiens d’une “possibilité de l’État”. Cet article entend reprendre les ressorts historiques et sociologiques d’un tel archivage, sur le papier illégal, mais aussi répandu que normalisé et même légitimé par ces archivistes. Plus encore, c’est un phénomène reconnu par l’État libanais lui-même, créant ainsi une forme d’archivage “externalisé” qui a de fortes implications méthodologiques sur l’accès aux sources et la possibilité d’une écriture de l’histoire de l’État libanais.

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  • 1 Some manufactured artistic archives having actually been mistaken for real archives. A doctorate t (...)
  • 2 As an example, a doctorate thesis in the 2000s bases itself on a situation supposedly taking place (...)

1Since the 2000s and their archival turn, considerations on archiving in Lebanon have become two-sided: on the one hand archives -especially political ones- are deemed obviously absent in the light of the “ma fi dawlé” (there is no State) motto that slightly differs from the state of archiving in other Arab countries plagued with authoritarian management, dissimulation and access refusal (Shamel 2018). On the other hand, archives are also the subject of artistic and militant endeavours, leading to the creation of archive collections as an artistic or political gesture (Haugbolle 2010) or even to the gap-filling creation of archives from scratch (Baumann 2009)1. These abundant reflections pushed into the background a more mundane approach to existing archives, their daily life, whose complexity can not be addressed by an inventory nor by description in absentia. How can one for instance understand the joint existence of the two following situations?2

December 2015: home of former Secretary-General of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. Since going into retirement, Omar Messaike, an historic figure at this position – close to former Prime Minister Rachid Karamé – has been busy publishing his memoirs. During the interview he stands up from his desk and removes a black plastic file from a bookcase behind me. He opens it, revealing many pictures and official documents bearing the Council of Ministers letterhead. On the shelf, dozens of others are tidily aligned.

[…]

  • 3 Field notebook excerpts from a thesis on high civil servants and intermediary elites during the ci (...)

July 2016: I take advantage of a visit on the premises of the Council of Ministers to enquire about archives. I am taken to a room where nothing, from the furniture to the letterhead paper (untouched in the few drawers that are not empty), has changed since 1974.3

  • 4 All these individuals were interviewed within the framework of the thesis referenced in the previo (...)

2Both these situations are representative of the state of archiving in Lebanon and the Arab world. In the first instance many of these archives are private, and/or owned by individuals rather than institutions (Bontemps 2012). In the second, public archives simply do not exist, as mentioned earlier. Considered jointly, these two situations raise another, less covered issue: the privatisation and outsourcing of public archives. In the absence of the State and lack of action on its behalf the archives of the Council of Ministers have not disappeared: like many other things they have been displaced.4

  • 5 All these individuals were interviewed within the framework of the thesis referenced in the previo (...)
  • 6 Interview no. 1, former employee of Electricité du Liban or EDL, 2015. EDL is the Lebanese nationa (...)
  • 7 Interview no. 2, former general secretary, 2015.
  • 8 Interview no. 3, former military officer, 2017.

3Indeed individuals granting interviews5 in the course of this research were mostly doing it in the shadow of archives collected during their tenure. They are for many “living memories” or “living archives” who have never left their administrations, are identified as custodians of their institutional stories and use these knowledge and reputation in return to fuel self-portrayal. This is the case of a former engineer introducing himself as “the living memory of Electricité du Liban”6 who kept many documents from his time at EDL; of a former member of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers who kept an advisory position (including to other services looking for historical references) despite being over 80;7 or of a former military officer asked by the Lebanese armed forces to provide archives.8 Despite being associated with the seemingly “modern” spheres of administration, some of these characters are reminiscent of personified historical transmission dynamics at play in the region, whether traditional such as tribes in Jordan (Shryock 1997) or more ancient (Loiseau 2019).

4How can these phenomena be questioned? A first question is of course the content of these archives. But in general, rather than the information coming from the documents themselves, it is above all the difficulties of access and the incessant negotiations that pile up, on their periphery. So much so that the many interactions with the document custodians, rather than the documents themselves, which are almost never accessible, end up forming a material and raising a second methodological question (France, P. to be published).

5A third answer, which is the aim of this article, consists in acknowledging the significance of the very existence of such a phenomenon, and taking it as an historical and sociological enigma in itself. Why and how have these documents ended up in the homes and private offices of hese high civil servants and what are the historicity and social dynamics at play? How do these individuals account for a situation that could legally be defined as theft? How does the Lebanese state address the existence of this “bootleg” archiving and deal – if it does – with this irregular existence beyond itself?

Dynamics of the obvious

A tradition?

  • 9 Interview no. 4, general director of the presidency, 2014.
  • 10 My thanks go to Wissam al Lahham for highlighting this issue.

6Why does one take archives away? On behalf of tradition, according to a 1975 report on archives: “The archives of Lebanon were considered, under the first two regimes [feudalism and qaimaqamat], not as public domain but rather as private property of the Emir or the governor, hence their subjection, in a way, to inheritance laws” (Messaike 1975). Archives appear as a symbol – among others – of the fact that the Lebanese state is something that can be owned, shared and taken away for one’s own purposes, far from Weberian theories of the State and closer to the idea of patrimonial state (Leenders 2004). This relation to archives is so deeply ingrained that a General Director of the Presidency can use legal vocabulary to describe such a practice during an interview: “As a high civil servant it is not legal to own [documents] at home, as Prime Minister it is, a President it is…”,9 although there is no legal basis to support this assertion.10

7The mere hypothesis of ongoing practices since the 17th century in a country that would have failed to develop beyond pre-Modern State logics (Bourdieu 2012) is lazy however if devoid of a second element: part of Lebanese politicians are heirs to well-established families with an archiving tradition. Indeed among the different types of archives, family archives benefit from the best state of conservation (Maffi 2006) in a region where family remains an enduring institution. The private appropriation logic of public archives thus sits at the crossroads of these two phenomena: patrimonial state and family as a historical institution.

8However, the fate of archives is neither solely linked to alive and well traditions nor the recipient – among others – of corrupting practices and the sharing of the State and its resources among a limited number of stakeholders. Archiving develops indeed not only among traditionally well-established politicians but also among more humble-rooted civil servants, within the framework of daily bureaucratic practices that must be grasped other than critically.

The bureaucratic ordinary

9Considering the case of middle (rather than upper) class civil servants rather than top level politicians, these archives can be considered as personal for other reasons. Firstly, because in the Lebanese bureaucracy, positions are created and tailored by individuals who will, in return, invest their social image and honour (Johnson 2002) in them. The underside of a personal relationship with the State – usually grasped through a critical view of nepotism and patrimonialism – is made of a complex, fully fledged, long-term day to day investment of a given position. Some of the individuals interviewed have occupied the same position for 30 years, not to mention families embodying institutions (the Mobayed family and Electricité du Liban in the 1950s, or the Lebanese military forces that used to be structured through father-son dynamics and sibling joint enlistment), (Massoud 1984). Moreover, in a newly created state, the number of public institutions and civil servants grew steadily until the start of the civil war (1975). In such a context, administrative services were created along with “founding fathers” crediting themselves for the existence of of this or that segment of bureaucracy.

10The importance and intensity of this personal investment can be measured by the repeated presence, years later, of “elders” or retired members of staff who retain a position in administrations they are officially no longer part of. From the General Director (Directeur Général, or DG) of Finance now advising the Central Bank to the DG of the Ministry of Hydroelectric Resources using the office of the current DG and remaining the reference person for international partnerships to this day, or the former telecommunication DG who remained the representative for Lebanon to some international institutions despite being over 80, many of these elders remain in one way or another in the administration, making use of a quasi-right of inspection. In other words, this dynamic of remaining in one’s stronghold stems from the very same dynamic of taking one’s archives: the merging of positions and the individuals who occupy them. Oddly enough, such an approach is opposed by these unremovable civil servants to the way – deemed dysfunctional – administrative positions are notoriously distributed between the different political parties and communities within the lebanese consociationnalist frame of power (Lijphart 1977), although a simplistic analysis (modernity vs patrimonialism) would have considered these two approaches utterly similar. However, for these out of sync high civil servants, their own patrimonialism, along with the continuity and stability it represents in the face of cyclical and irregular political dynamics, ensures the State is properly functioning.

  • 11 Ibid.
  • 12 Za’im is the singular of zu’ama.
  • 13 Interview no. 5, former Telecommunication DG, 2014.

11In return, the story told by these documents and individuals is that of an administrative fatherly (and extremely gendered) figure, a man fighting alone against the administrative machine – like this DG who “was not a civil servant in the usual meaning of the word, [but] a man in service”,11 (Massoud 1984) – or against political divisions, far from the “hezbiyé, siyassiyé, ta'ifiyyé” (partisan, political, sectarian) motto (Chader 1978: 5). In these conditions it is out of the question to write even a line of the collective history of an institution not exclusively boiled down to its leaders, a charismatic narrative format largely drawn from the narrative logics developed around the lives of Lebanese “zuama” (or political leaders) (Mermier, Mervin 2012). Such a title being incidentally borrowed – sometimes as a joke – by some, including a former DG referring to a subordinate “[calling him] za’im12”.13

Documents as proof and protection

  • 14 Interview no. 1, former employee of EDL, 2015.

12This relation to archives mirrors daily life in the administration on another aspect: documents are paramount to become one of these potentially unremovable high civil servants in a bureaucratic context where clientelism and corruption reach such levels they are rationally managed, as shows the testimony of a former employee of Electricité du Liban describing a register of all the workers, along with the name of the politician that won them the job.14 Documents are also important in a bureaucratic context where careers are irregular and seldom uneventful.

13Taking documents away enables to retain the control over everything that could be used by adversaries as well as anything that cannot be archived without guarantee of delayed access or reliable control (that would allow to hide said documents from scrutiny during a given legal period). Retaining documents stems from a protection process that itself derives from the ever-present possibility that documents might be used as proof or weapon. In this established instable context, some interviewees put documents aside throughout their entire career, like this former advisor:

  • 15 Interview no. 6, former technical advisor, 2015.

“[I go and see a manager and ask her] “do you allow me to have access to my personal file?” […] I find a yellow piece of paper, “Madam do you allow me to make a copy it it?”. I kept it as a secret”15 [the document will enable him later on to file a plea to the Lebanese Council of State].

14Likewise, taking away archives enables to possess compromising documents that can be used against certain individuals. In this regard, it is common for interviewees to say that they “have many things”, a mysterious and vague statement not really meant at the researcher but rather expressing a state of constant fear and threat as well as a possibility to be publicly accused of something. Gathering as many documents as possible ensures to be unremovable and not to fall victim of the complex government appointment games or the successive administrative purges. Potential sidelining or degradation exist in an unstable administrative world and most civil servants have in mind precedents calling for caution. Taking archives away not only means rewriting History, but also protecting oneself with working documents. As they can concern decades-long careers, these documents “naturally” turn into archives after a while. As such the desire to write one’s institution’s history, when it exists, derives from the instability and violence of careers in the administration. In the same way, becoming a “living archive” relates to another potential career glitch: never fully retiring means preventing cruel ends of career in the public service, where retirement is anticipated with the highest concern (C.N.A.F., 2005).

A paradoxal sensitivity to archives

A generational relation

15What do the most directly concerned think about this process of taking archives away? The gesture is not considered as theft or a violation of any sort as it not only fits into the daily workings of the administration but is also conducted by individuals who have shown an awareness about archives throughout their career. A striking example illustrates this paradox: how can Omar Messaike (the SG mentioned earlier in this article) possess archives of his institution in his own home while having pro-actively contributed in 1979 to the opening of the very official Centre for National Archives (Centre des Archives Nationales) as the founding father?

16This paradox is only apparent in the approach of these high civil servants. Indeed, they neither take away archives for a personal use nor appropriate them without considering their action in a wider context: they keep against all odds a heightened sensitivity to archives understood as documents with a public vocation. On this subject, assimilating their approach to ongoing practices since feudal times would be a major misinterpretation. On the contrary, their practices derive from a very “modern” concern about archives as well as from the “archiving momentum” Lebanon experienced in the 1970s when many sorting, safeguarding, and stocktaking initiatives developed before falling into oblivion due to the war. Omar Messaike is thus part of this generation whose administrative career started when criticism concerning the absence of archives already existed, as this excerpt from a UNDP report shows: “in a small locked storage room about 2000 magazines, bulletins, books and reports of all kinds since 1930 were scattered around, in piles on the floor, twisted, folded, sometimes damaged” (Messaike 1975: 126). Such a critical assessment coming at that time from within the State (whereas after the war the same criticism will mainly be voiced – in roughly the same terms – from outside by civil society organizations and NGOs) was accompanied by a new set of practices.

17Prior to the war, taking care of archives is actuallyone component of a deep investment into one’s position and institution, as a former DG from the Ministry of Justice explains:

  • 16 Interview no. 7, former DG of Justice, 2014.

“I was meddling with everything. And was thinking, we will see who is in the wrong when I get arrested. For instance […] I was the first to discover that there were snakes and insects in the archives. And that it cost taxpayers a lot to retrieve a file…I obtained the authorisation from the Council of Ministers to mandate a pest control company to clean the premises”. These archives will be in return a particularly useful resource, successfully used by this general director in a conflict opposing his service with another administration: “ I gathered a team of civil servants, I told them get the old archives, get all the decisions taken by the general directors before me…”.16

18Both this DG and Omar Messaike illustrate, through their respective approaches, the importance of archives in the pre-war period. The latter, who attempts in the 1970s a new “information system” within the Council of Ministers, will even go as far as to turn archiving into “his” project, with the ambition to coordinate and gather the different archives – such as those of the Ministry of Justice – in a single location.

19Given the efforts shown for years to implement the Centre National des Archives, Omar Messaike’s decision to take archives away years later appears as another expression of a constant awareness and a certain attachment to public service. It is intriguing however that, over a thirty-year period, the logic goes from setting up a public institution to privately safeguarding archives. It is first the sign of a probable personal disgrace, the man once belonging to the entourage of a politician (Rachid Karamé) whose disappearance in 1987 paved the way for other profiles and networks that will oust Messaike from the Presidency of the Council. But it also points at more global transformations of the way the Lebanese administration works and deals with archiving.

State exhibition as self-exhibition

20First, testimonies of the State’s doings are saved as a precautionary measure to better show what the State could have been. A sign of mistrust against the “real State” of the 2010s, this behaviour aims at staging a (fantasised) pre-war State. This logic is visible through the archives shown during interviews but also through the surrounding historical narratives, such as the one developed by a former member of Fouad Chehab’s entourage (Lebanon’s “golden age” President from 1958 to 1964) who bursted during an interview about an aborted project:

  • 17 Interview no. 8, former advisor to Fouad Chéhab, 2012.

“[we] brought down the Tripoli Fair. A project aiming at turning Tripoli into a free zone and an exhibition park for Asia, into Dubai! […] We brought Niemeyer, the greatest architect of the time, who had designed Brasilia, we expropriated, we designed the plans […] the perspectives were 2000 or 3000 foreign workers, and 20000 or 30000 jobs for the Lebanese!”17

21It is an unknown side of the “glory of chehabism” (Malsagne 2011) that has grown since the 1990s to stage all those who contributed to this period as the guardians of these unrealised potentials.

22Ensuring visibility around what the State has been and what the State could have been also means staging oneself as actor of it, and hinting at what careers could have been built had it not been for political pressure and, more globally, for the major social upheaval experienced by Lebanon where statuses and upward mobility were mangled. Here again, archives have a personal dimension as this former technical advisor tells:

  • 18 Interview no. 6, former technical advisor, 2015.

“Two of my decree drafts have been signed. As the CEO of the pharmaceutical laboratory. And another as the interim DG of the Ministry of Health. None of them saw the light of day […] [Moreover] a President of the Republic had decided to appoint me as President of the Council of Public Service… Unfortunately, all my life politics have been against me.”18

23On this topic, archiving practices brings together certain social profiles, particularly individuals who held to their position, and particularly invested in their public career as a path to upward mobility. The issue of sensitivity to archives is not only generational, but also eminently social: not everybody developed a liking for archiving, and those coming from middle-class backgrounds who bet on the State to ensure the success of their career make the biggest numbers.

24Taking possession of archives thus leads to a potential rewriting of a bigger history as well as of one’s position within it. Yet it potentially erases another aspect of administrative life: the fact that it does not only unfold over daily documents, but rather retains some essential oral aspects. This is why a former high civil servant, proud not to be (at the time of he was in the administration) an “old bureaucrat” […] who is satisfied to spend his time signing routine papers and documents” (Maalouf 2014: 10) or “suffer[ring] to find himself in a maze of formalism and prerogatives overlapping one another” (Massoud 1984: 89), yet ends up jealously keeping documents years later when he retires. Prone to present themselves as capable back then of solving a problem with a phone call to speed up the procedure, these very same people refer to document after document once out of their institution. Guardians as a last resort of signatures and procedures but also actors capable of overlooking these procedures during their tenure, masterfully mixing orality and writing, they are eventually brought down to documents only. These very documents, accumulated according to a peculiar career and political logic (cf. above), turn out not to be potentially very representative of the administration’s daily activity.

  • 19 Interview no. 8, former DG of a water office, 2016.
  • 20 Interview no. 9, senior civil servant in office, 2014.

25To this can be added a paradox in the activity of these actors, namely their contribution to processes they nonetheless criticise: taking archives away contributes to the weakening of a State deemed too weak to keep these archives. Such a behaviour is therefore often presented as a last resort act – “I took everything they were about to throw away”19 says one of the interviewees about the archives dating from the Ottoman era of his institution – unless someone else acts this way, in which case the gesture is seen as “theft”.20 The concept of scotomisation (Gaxie 2005) seems particularly adapted to this doublespeak around the issue of archives as actors accuse each other of theft and monopolisation while highlighting their own altruistic gesture towards endangered archives that ought to be saved: two stances that can be expressed sometimes within a single sentence during an interview.

The reaction of the Lebanese State towards this false absence

26Yet this ambiguity must be considered as ensuing from a global situation and not a personal decision, because all these actors have similar practices (sometimes without knowing it), and they actively interact with their institutions, and more widely with the Lebanese State: scotomisation also plays at a structural level. The presence of public archives beyond the State is as known within the administration as are rumours of mistreatment of archives by the State itself, to the point that this strange externalised presence is partly managed.

  • 21 Interview no. 4, general director of the presidency, 2014.

27Over the past decades the Lebanese state has regularly attempted to gather archives, whether they are located inside or outside the State, yet through an erratic management and projects that appear and disappear with their “founding fathers” and waves of international funds. As a telling example the Centre des Archives Nationales (CAN) was created in 1979 but decreased in activity from the mid-1980s, to be briefly revived later in the 2000s through an archiving programme co-managed with OMSAR, the then new administrative reform agency. Since then, several elements point out to the adoption of a new model: the absence of funding for the CAN since the 2000s, the misfortune of the National Library project (Verdeil 2013) as well as the redeployment of international aid to the benefit of a new type of NGOs sprung from the flourishing memory and archive market. To such an extent that the Lebanese state acknowledged its own absence and mobilised private actors to run its archives in the 2010s, openly externalising archiving. As a consequence, from 2014 the presidential palace – or Baabda – initiated a programme in partnership with private establishment Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik,21 calling on the family of the former presidents who kept archives.

28However the Lebanese State also increasingly expresses a more discrete acknowledgement of the bootleg archiving endeavors of its former representatives: the latter are asked to provide archives, usually for tribute publications celebrating various institutions. Thus, the existence of bootleg archiving and “living memories” is not only the result of a personal stance but is also acknowledged by institutions finding them useful. Indeed, beyond the lack of accessibility for researchers and the lack of inventories, current civil servants are also prevented from accessing these archives in their daily work. As institutions need a minimum amount of memory to function properly, personal recollections and private collections turn out to be necessary. In this respect, high civil servants-turned-archivists slightly differ both from their peers who write their memoirs (Gaïti 2002) and from the ordinary men and women keeping documents relating to their personal or professional life (Auvert 2009): there is something more at play in the acknowledgement, and even the precedence that is de facto perceived as theirs. As such, they are recognised as established self-labelled archivists in their institution who manage now externalised and semi-privatised public archives.

Conclusion

29In 1975, a report on archives in Lebanon described most of the archiving processes as resulting primarly from the goodwill of a single civil servant within each structure, who invented in passing their own filing system. In the Ministry of Finance for instance “during 30 years, from 1939 to 1969, it is a civil servant – who attended an archiving finishing course in France – who took care of it” (Messaike 1975: 175). More than 45 years later, archives still result from the goodwill of individuals, although the latter are no longer ordinary civil servants but retired heads of administration; moreover these irregular archives are no longer located within these administrations but outside. Public archives in Lebanon are therefore not only abandoned and inaccessible, they are also porous and left to the goodwill of individuals who might potentially take them away for various reasons.

30The notions of absent State (ma fi dawlé) where archives are doomed to disappear or are considered to be simply non-existent by nature, and of an authoritarian State preventing access to archives finally cohabit in Lebanon with externalised archives signalling a porous State de facto (but not publicly) acknowledged as such. In such a situation, researchers’ “demand for archives” potentially faces a number of well known situations: absence of archives, politically-motivated refusal, absence of answer. Although these numerous obstacles can result from political issues, they are also explained by issues of self-portrayal and staging of an artificial coherence of the State aimed at outsiders. In particular, it seems difficult to publicly acknowledge the fact that the Lebanese state tries above all recovering or using archives rather than making them available to the public. Research on the public sector thus appears – unwittingly more often than not – to swim against a certain social reality when it asks the administration for archives while the latter relies itself extensively on external partners, should they be institutions or individuals, when it comes to these matters.

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Bibliographie

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Notes

1 Some manufactured artistic archives having actually been mistaken for real archives. A doctorate thesis in the 2000s for instance bases itself on a situation supposedly taking place during the civil war that has in reality been created from start to finish by an artist, Walid Raad. Considered as true, it thus becomes the subject of a scientific analysis by the author.

2 As an example, a doctorate thesis in the 2000s bases itself on a situation supposedly taking place during the civil war that has in reality been created from start to finish by an artist, Walid Raad. Considered as true, it thus becomes the subject of a scientific analysis by the author.

3 Field notebook excerpts from a thesis on high civil servants and intermediary elites during the civil war, cf. “En attendant l’État. Déformation de l’État et ressorts de la survie institutionnelle pendant la guerre civile libanaise (1975-1990)”, Thesis for the doctorate in political science, université Paris 1 (to be finished by 2021).

4 All these individuals were interviewed within the framework of the thesis referenced in the previous footnote.

5 All these individuals were interviewed within the framework of the thesis referenced in the previous footnote.

6 Interview no. 1, former employee of Electricité du Liban or EDL, 2015. EDL is the Lebanese national electricity provider.

7 Interview no. 2, former general secretary, 2015.

8 Interview no. 3, former military officer, 2017.

9 Interview no. 4, general director of the presidency, 2014.

10 My thanks go to Wissam al Lahham for highlighting this issue.

11 Ibid.

12 Za’im is the singular of zu’ama.

13 Interview no. 5, former Telecommunication DG, 2014.

14 Interview no. 1, former employee of EDL, 2015.

15 Interview no. 6, former technical advisor, 2015.

16 Interview no. 7, former DG of Justice, 2014.

17 Interview no. 8, former advisor to Fouad Chéhab, 2012.

18 Interview no. 6, former technical advisor, 2015.

19 Interview no. 8, former DG of a water office, 2016.

20 Interview no. 9, senior civil servant in office, 2014.

21 Interview no. 4, general director of the presidency, 2014.

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Pierre France, « Living memories and State archives: A false absence. Top civil servants and scotomisation of public archives in Lebanon »Égypte/Monde arabe, 22 | 2020, 123-135.

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Pierre France, « Living memories and State archives: A false absence. Top civil servants and scotomisation of public archives in Lebanon »Égypte/Monde arabe [En ligne], 22 | 2020, mis en ligne le 03 janvier 2022, consulté le 17 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ema/13186 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ema.13186

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Auteur

Pierre France

Pierre France is a Research Associate at the Orient Institut Beirut, and a PhD candidate in Political Science at Paris 1 Sorbonne University. His thesis is about the phenomenon of continuous state activity in Lebanon during the civil war (1975-1990). He has published in various journals (Annales d’Islamologie, Confluences Méditerranée, Revue Française d’Administration Publique, Quaderni, Champ Pénal), and he co-authored The Neoliberal Republic. Corporate Lawyers, Statecraft, and the Making of Public-Private France with Antoine Vauchez (Cornell, 2021). http://www.cessp.cnrs.fr/spip.php?rubrique163

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Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

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