Rahaf Aldoughli

Lecturer

Lancaster University Lancaster University

Rahaf teaches courses on the Comparative Politics and International Relations of the Middle East, and is a Visiting Fellow at LSE Middle East Centre. Her areas of research expertise include identifying the ideological borrowings between European and Arab nationalism, the rise of the nation-state in the Middle East, the Syria crisis, militarism and the construction of masculinity in the Arab world.

Her research also focuses on the association between the rise of nation-states in the Middle East and the perpetuation of militarism, despotism and fundamentalism, analysing militarism in the Arab context not only as an institution used by the state, but also as an ideology that perpetuates masculinity and gender bias.

Before moving to Lancaster, Rahaf was lecturer at the University of Manchester teaching Modern Middle Eastern History. She was based at the Centre for Cultural History of War. She completed her doctorate in Politics at Lancaster University in 2017.

She is currently working on her book Constructing the Nation: Masculinism and Gender Bias in Syrian Nationalism (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press) looks at the idealisation of militarism in Syrian culture and constitutions with particular focus on the origin of the Ba’ath ideology in the thought of Syrian nationalists.

Expertise

Rise of nation-states in the Middle East; militarism; gender bias; masculinism; Syrian crisis; nationalism

@r_aldoughli

Selected Publications

  • Aldoughli, R. “Interrogating the Construction of Gendered Identity in Syrian Nationalist Narrative: al-Husari, Aflaq and Arsuzi”. Syria Studies 9, no. 1 (2017): 64–120
  • Aldoughli, R. “Revisiting Ideological Borrowings in Syrian Nationalist Narratives: Sati ‘al-Husri, Michel ‘Aflaq and Zaki al-Arsuzi”. Syria Studies 8, no. 1 (2016): 7–39
  • Aldoughli, R. “Negotiating Gender Boundaries in the Constitutional Narratives (1973–2012): Construction of Militant Identity”. SyriaUntold.com, June 2016.
  • Aldoughli, R. “The Deconstruction of Masculinism in the two Contemporary Schools of Thought: Primordialism and Modernism”. The Luminary, no. 5 (Winter 2014): 63–81.
  • Aldoughli, R. “Syrian nationalism is all about masculinity”. The Conversation (13 December 2017).
Posts from Rahaf Aldoughli (Show All)
Collectivizing Trauma and Narrative in the Syrian War: Sectarianization and Ontological Security This essay is part of a SEPAD report reflecting on the Middle East in 2050.  The Syrian conflict has often been described as a clash of identities between minority Alwaites and majority Sunnis (Balanche, 2018: xi; Lesch, 2012: 101). Today there is... Read More
Reports from Rahaf Aldoughli (Show All)
The Securitisation of the ‘Masculinist’ other in the Syrian conflict Amidst the violence that has spread across Syria since 2011, most scholarship concerned with the Syrianconflict has focused on questions related to how the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran has shaped the Syrian crisis.1 The escalated rivalry between... Read More
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