Tamirace Fakhoury

Tamirace Fakhoury is Associate Professor of International Politics and Conflict at the Fletcher School. Her research explores the politics of power-sharing as a central framework for conflict resolution after war, with a particular focus on the tensions and trade-offs inherent in peacebuilding and democratization processes. Her work also engages with the politics of refuge and migration in complex conflict environments. She analyzes displacement not merely as a consequence of violence, but as a constitutive component of the conflict itself. In this regard, she studies how refugee displacement intersects with questions of sovereignty and conflict management. She also studies the role of multilateral actors—such as the European Union and the United Nations—in shaping global responses to conflict, cooperation and responsibility-sharing in protracted conflicts. She is interested in teaching, research and policy approaches accounting for the political agency of states and societies that may have been perceived to be on the margins of power in the international system.

Before joining Fletcher, she was Associate Professor of Political Science at Aalborg University in its Copenhagen Campus (Denmark), and a visiting Professor as well as the Kuwait Chair at Sciences Po in Paris (2020-2022). As of 2024, Tamirace is an adjunct professor at the Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA) at Sciences Po where she lectures occasionally.

Prior to this, Tamirace was Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the Lebanese American University and the Director of the Institute for Social Justice and Conflict Resolution (ISJCR) where she led the project "Resilience and Inclusive Governance in the post-2011 Middle East" funded by the Carnegie Foundation of New York. From 2012 until 2016, she was a visiting Assistant Professor in the summer sessions at the University of California in Berkeley where she initially carried out part of her postdoctoral project in spring 2011 at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES).

Tamirace is the recipient of several research awards and fellowships such as the post-doctoral Jean Monnet Fellowship at the European University in Florence (awarded as the Vincent Wright Fellowship in Comparative Politics), the Alexander von Humboldt fellowship at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg, and the Kaete Hamburger Fellowship at the Global Center for Cooperation Research in Duisburg where she conducted her research in the cluster on Global Cooperation and polycentric governance. In 2023, Tamirace earned the Carlsberg Monograph fellowship to write a book on political systems, conflict, and time in post-war societies.

She is a co-investigator in the GCRF-funded Rights for Time project where she leads the research strand on how policy time shapes conflict, displacement and humanitarianism. Tamirace is also affiliated with the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies as a senior fellow and with the Global Center for Cooperation Research in Duisburg-Essen as Associate Senior Fellow.

Her work has been published in Ethnopolitics, The international Journal of Middle East Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Geopolitics, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Migration Studies, Third World Quarterly, Middle East Policy, the Middle East Journal, Current History among others. She is the author of Power-Sharing and Democracy in Stormy Weather ( Springer, 2009) and the co-author of Resisting Sectarianism: Queer Activism in Post-war Lebanon (Zed Books, 2022). She is the co-editor of the anthology (with Dawn Chatty) on Refugee Governance in the Arab World: The International Refugee Regime and Global Politics (I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury publishing in collaboration with Sciences Po, 2025).

Tamirace serves on the editorial boards of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Development Policy Review, Refugee Survey Quarterly and the Middle East Journal. She is also on the advisory b …