Dr Bashir Saade

I am an Interdisciplinary Lecturer in Politics and Religion at the University of Stirling. I previously held posts at the University of Edinburgh and at the American University of Beirut.I have a PhD in War Studies at King’s College, and an MSc in International Political Economy from LSE.

My research has been fundamentally interdisciplinary, crossing between international politics, anthropology, literary studies, social theory, and more recently sound studies. My book titled Hizbullah and the Politics of Remembrance (Cambridge University Press, 2016) was a theoretical contribution to the concept of Ideology in political studies that proposed an intellectual history of the Lebanese political party that contrasted with prevailing understandings of Islamic political movements and their relationship with national imagination and state formation.

Examples of themes I published on include how Islamic groups frame notions of terrorism intellectually and in practice, through policy, proposing non-Western approaches to the study of “terrorism”, and often produced by groups who were labelled as “terrorist” by Western powers. I also wrote on the extent to which groups such as Islamic State are profoundly shaped by technological, audio-visual, and media revolutions of the last two decades and that TV series such as Game of Thrones tell us more about their ideological universe than a so-called age-old “Islamicity”. These works are in continuity with my interest in studying the importance of technological changes to the shaping of the global modern subject.

My forthcoming co-authored book, International Political Economy In Context (Routledge 2024) is a first-of-its-kind textbook that looks at the field from several disciplinary angles (anthropological, historical, political) in order to propose de-colonial, and critical readings of its major themes and concepts. Amongst other ideas, it introduces notions of “security” as an essential component of political economy, varying across different parts of the world. This project was funded by the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) as part of a working group created by the Beirut Critical Security Studies School (BCSS). The BCSS (http://thebeirutforum.com), of which I am a core faculty, was founded to propose new IR theoretical frameworks with a special view from the South.

My future projects attempt to link my lifetime-long experience in music with my intellectual interest in colonialism, modernity, and nationalism. As a musician, focusing on the Arabic nay flute and specializing in the old Arabic repertoire of the Nahda period (19th and early 20th century) as found in early twentieth century recordings from Egypt and Syria. I am a core contributor to Prof. Martin Stokes (King’s College London) ERC funded project on the 1932 Cairo Music Congress, and part of the internationally acclaimed Oxford Maqam band (http://oxfordmaqam.com) that specialises in the music of this period.

Islam, nationalism, postcolonialism, modernity, political thought, critical religion, premodern scholarship and knowledge transmission, music, technology.