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 peace governance and democratization. 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 process itself. In this regard, she examines 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 crises. She is interested in teaching, research, and policy approaches that account for the political agency of states and societies often 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's 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 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 Corporation of New York. From 2012 to 2016, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the summer sessions at the University of California, Berkeley, where she had 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, including the postdoctoral Jean Monnet Fellowship at the European University Institute 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 Käte Hamburger Fellowship at the Global Center for Cooperation Research in Duisburg, where she conducted research in the cluster on global cooperation and polycentric governance. In 2023, she received the Carlsberg Monograph Fellowship to write a book on political systems, conflict, and time in post-war societies.

From 2020 to 2024, she was co-investigator in the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Project on Rights for Time, where she led the research strand on how policy time shapes conflict, displacement, and humanitarianism. Tamirace is affiliated with the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies as a Senior Fellow and with the Global Center for Cooperation Research in Duisburg–Essen as an 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 also the co-editor (with Dawn Chatty) of the anthology Refugee Governance in the Arab World: The International Refugee Regime and Global Politics (I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury Academic in collaboration with Sciences Po, 2025).

Tamirace serves on the editorial boards of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Comparative Migration Studies, Refugee Survey Quarterly, and the Middle East Jour …