[Public Roundtable] The State and Politics of Urban Knowledge Production in/on SWANA

Sarah El-Kazaz is Associate Professor in the politics department at SOAS, University of London and author of the award-winning Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul (Duke UP, 2023). Her research interests include: critical political economy, urbanism, infrastructure and digital politics, and her new book project investigates the politics of digital infrastructures by following “Cloud” technologies across the Global South. Her work appears in peer-reviewed journals including Comparative Studies in Society and History, and City and Society. She is co-founder of the Urban Political in SWANA network, co-convenor of the public seminar series on Histories of Capitalism and Race in the Middle East and Beyond through the Walter Rodney Collective at SOAS, vice chair of the APSA-MENA section, and is on the editorial board of Economy and Society and editorial team of the Arab Studies Journal. She previously taught at Oberlin College, and completed a PhD at Princeton University.

Mona Fawaz is Professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the American University of Beirut where she co-founded the Beirut Urban Lab, a regional research center based at the American University of Beirut and invested in working towards more inclusive, just, and viable cities.  She lives and works in Beirut where she researches urbanization through the lenses of informality and the law, land, housing, property and space, responding to the urge of informing planning theory and practice. She is contributed to this roundtable in her capacity as a member of the editorial collective of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR). 

Adam Hanieh is currently Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter (UK) and Joint Chair in Middle East Studies at the Institute of International and Area Studies, Tsinghua University, Beijing. In February 2026, he will be moving to SOAS, University of London  to take up a new role as Director of the SOAS Middle East Institute. His most recent book Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market came out with Verso Books in 2024 and was co-winner of the 2025 Best Book by an International Scholar, Global and Transnational Section of the American Sociological Association.

Mona Harb is Professor of Urban Studies and Politics at the American University of Beirut where she also co-leads the Beirut Urban Lab (BUL). Her current research investigates local governance and urban politics, aid infrastructures, and collectives advancing urban and ecological commons. She is the author of Le Hezbollah à Beirut: de la banlieue à la ville, co-author of Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’i South Beirut (with Lara Deeb), and co-editor of Local Governments and Public Goods: Assessing Decentralization in the Arab World (with Sami Atallah). Harb is the co-founder of the Urban Political in SWANA network, and serves on the editorial boards of IJMES, CSSAME, and EPC. She is leading the environmental activism track of the research project “Climate, Land, Rights” at The Policy Initiative.

Rima Majed is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies Department at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Her work focuses on the fields of social movements, uprisings, sectarianism, conflict and violence, with a focus on the Middle East. Dr. Majed was a visiting fellow at Princeton University in 2018/19, and a research fellow at Harvard University in 2022/23. Her work has appeared in several journals, books and media platforms. She is also the co-editor of The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution (I.B. Tauris, 2022), and the Principal Investigator on the “Critical Approaches to Development Studies in the Middle East and North Africa" project at the American University of Beirut (Lebanon).