The Speakers

Sami Atallah is the Founding Director of The Policy Initiative, a Lebanese independent think-tank aiming at critically and empirically assess existing policies and generate meaningful alternatives. He is trained in economics and political science, and was the director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies from January 2011 till December 2020. 

Mona Khechen is an independent urban and regional development planner and researcher. Her work addresses different aspects of development and focuses on social justice and strategic and sustainable interventions, especially in contexts of rapid urbanization, inequality, conflict, migration and displacement. Her research interests include the interplay of politics and development, urban transformations, and the commodification of heritage and identity. She holds a doctorate degree from Harvard University. 

Mona and Sami have recently published, among others, "No Climate Justice in the Context of War" in The Policy Initiative.

Munira Khayyat is Associate Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is an anthropologist whose research revolves around life in war, intimate genealogies of empire, and theory from the South. Her first book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (University of California Press 2022) examines resistant ecologies in a world of perennial warfare. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in frontline villages along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, she examines war not only as a place of death and destruction, but also necessarily, as an environment of living.