Author Archive

Raphaël Lefèvre

Raphaël Lefèvre is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. Before moving to Oxford, he was a Research Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s office in Beirut, where he published on Middle Eastern politics and Islamist movements and conducted extensive fieldwork, including dozens of interviews with Islamist militants.

We interviewed Raphaël Lefèvre about his new book Jihad in the City: Militant Islamism and Contentious Politics in Tripoli, available now. OxPol: What motivated you write your book? Raphaël Lefèvre: I wanted to shed light on a little-known historical event with large contemporary echo: the creation by a militant Islamist movement of an “Islamic Emirate” on the city of Tripoli, Lebanon in 1982-1985. This movement has modern parallels​ with the “Islamic Caliphate” created by ISIS in parts of Iraq and Syria after 2014 and with similar attempts by Al-Qaeda to create “Islamic Emirates” on the territories it has sporadically controlled recently, from Southern Yemen and Northern Mali to Northern Syria. I am not suggesting that the 1982-1985 “Islamic Emirate” in Tripoli …