Joseph Bahout

Director, Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI), the American University of Beirut (AUB)

Joseph Bahout is director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI) at the American University of Beirut (AUB), where he is also Associate Professor of Practice in Political Studies. Prior to that, he has been Visiting then Non-Resident Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment’s Middle East Program in Washington DC, Professor of Middle East Politics at Sciences Po Paris, and served as Permanent Consultant for the Policy Planning Unit (Centre d’analyse, de prévision et de stratégie -CAPS) at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Bahout was previously professor at Université Saint-Joseph in Lebanon (USJ), researcher at the Centre d’études et de recherches sur le Moyen-Orient contemporain (CERMOC, now IFPO), and Senior Fellow at Académie diplomatique internationale (ADI). Bahout earned a BA degree in Economics from the American University of Beirut, before getting a Diploma in International Relations from Institut d’études politiques de Paris (IEP, Sciences-Po Paris), and then achieving a PhD in Political Science at the same institution. Joseph Bahout is currently member of the Editorial Board of Revue Esprit, and of the Scientific Council of the Le Rubicon research and publications network. He is a Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy, and has been a Fellow of the Crown Center for Middle-Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of two books, on Syria’s business community and its political outlook (1994), and on Lebanon’s political reconstruction (1998), in addition to numerous articles and book chapters. He is a frequent commentator in European and Arab media.