Raphaël Lefèvre is no longer with the Carnegie Middle East Center.
Raphaël Lefèvre was a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center, where his research focuses on Sunni Islamist movements in Lebanon.
Lefèvre is currently the Rank-Manning Junior Research Fellow in Social Sciences at the University of Oxford (New College). He holds a doctorate in politics and international relations from the University of Cambridge where he was a Gates Scholar and the recipient of the 2015 Bill Gates Sr. Award.
Lefèvre is the author of Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (Oxford University Press, 2013) and co-author of State and Islam in Baathist Syria: Confrontation or Co-Optation? (Lynne Rienner, 2012). His publications on Islamist movements in the Middle East and North Africa have appeared in the Guardian, the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Sada, and the Journal of North African Studies.
The rise in Salafi militancy in Lebanon is not only due to the spillover of the Syrian war, but also to the Sunni elite’s failure at tackling the grievances of their co-religionists.
Ashraf Rifi would like to replace Saad al-Hariri as leader of Lebanon’s Sunnis, but his bid for leadership is risky.
As 2016 comes to a close, Diwan offers recommendations for this period of relative rest.
Syrian rebels are borrowing from the legacy of the Fighting Vanguard.
The newly-elected leader of Lebanon’s Jamaa al-Islamiya faces the uphill task of reforming the party and injecting new blood into its veins.
To avoid losing brigades to extremist rebel groups, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood must clarify their ideological stance toward a range of issues and disassociate themselves more clearly from extremist groups.
The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood had been in exile for a long time, so it had to work very hard to gain a measure of influence on the Syrian uprisings.
To revive the Sunni authority’s long tradition of Islamic moderation, Dar al-Fatwa’s new leader must unite all of Lebanon’s Sunni community.
The roots of the recent surge of Sunni extremism in Lebanon are local and deep. Pragmatic steps are needed to protect the country from the fate of Syria and Iraq.
With its 2014 leadership election, the Islamist group signaled that it is opening a new chapter. But some young members wanted to see even greater change.
