Bio
Aleksandra Kobiljski is a Senior Researcher Fellow (Directrice de recherches) in modern and contemporary history at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), with a research focus on the late Ottoman Empire and Mandate Period Lebanon. She currently completing a manuscript on community organizing and prefigurative politics in late Ottoman Lebanon. He research has received funding from Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and European Research Council (ERC).
Research project
The Pushback: Community Organizing and Prefigurative Politics in Ottoman Lebanon in the Global 1860s
This project employs the concept of prefigurative politics to examine the evolving nature of community organizing in late Ottoman Lebanon in the aftermath of the 1858-1860 civil war. Through an in-depth analysis of the wataniyya, a community hub and boarding school that operated in Beirut from 1863 to 1883, the project reconstructs its previously neglected political agenda. By illuminating the effects of the wataniyya's ethos on the local intellectual and political landscape, the project argues for a new reading of the nahda as not only a cultural and literary movement but also a deeply political project. Grounded in Ottoman and Lebanese archives, private correspodence and published texts, the project situates the wataniyya within the global history of prefigurative political projects that emerged following the civil violence of the 1850s and 1860s. In doing so, the project contributes to a more capacious understanding of how transnational networks were created and how they transformed the globe during the long nineteenth century.
