Sari Hanafi

Sari Hanafi is currently a professor of sociology at the American University of Beirut and chair of the Islamic Studies program. He is the president of the International Sociological Association and also the editor of Idafat: the Arab Journal of Sociology (Arabic). In 2018, Hanafi founded "Athar", the Portal for Social impact of scientific research in/on the Arab world. A Syrian-Palestinian, Hanafi studied engineering and got his BS in civil engineering from Damascus University (1984). Hanafi moved to social sciences later on and studied sociology from the same university where he got a BA in 1987. He then attended University of Strasbourg where he received a master's degree in 1989 under the supervision of Philippe Breton. In 1994, Hanafi finally got a PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, where he wrote his thesis entitled Les ingénieurs en Syrie: Modernisation, technobureaucratie et identité. He was the vice president of the board of the Arab Council of Social Science (2015-2016). He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales-Paris (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) (1994). He has also served as a visiting professor/fellow at the University of Poitiers and Migrintern and the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (France), University of Bologna and Ravenna (Italy), Chr. Michelsen Institute (Bergen-Norway), Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Hanafi was also a former senior researcher at the Cairo-based French research center, Centre d'études et de documentation économique juridique et sociale (1994-2000). He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on the sociology of religion, sociology of (forced) migration; politics of scientific research; civil society, elite formation and transitional justice. Among his recent books are: Addressing the rupture between the religious and social sciences: He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Poitiers and Migrintern, France, University of Bologna and Ravenna, Italy, and a visiting fellow in CMI, Bergen, Norway.