Maître de conférences
Associate professor
Collège de France, Paris
Biography
Matthieu Rey is an associate professor at Collège de France (Paris). He holds a PhD in history from the EHESS (Paris). His research focuses on the political systems in Iraq and Syria as case studies to understand policy- and state-building processes in the Middle East during the 1950s. He examines the political engineering of power and intends to publish a book on the parliamentary systems in Iraq and Syria between 1946 and 1963. He was a doctoral fellow at the Ifpo in Damascus between 2009 and 2013 and a research fellow at the Middle East Institute (Singapore). He is also fluent in Arabic. Apart from his main research, he has given speeches and published articles on elections in the Middle East, development policies, the Cold War, and the ‘Arab spring’.
Research project
Migrations and the margins
The distinction between forced and voluntary displacements has been questioned by recent studies. Previous elements of the context can explain why some individuals choose to migrate from a place to another, while others choose to stay. Moreover, different strategies implemented by the locals in order to face the violence or coercion can lead them to react differently. The Syrian crisis highlights many of these phenomena. It reveals implicit links and “rules of the game” in an authoritarian regime. It is possible to address some of these issues by launching a deep analysis based on paired comparison. The main research questions are: 1° How and why did/have the protest spread around the country 2° how and why do displaced people choose to move and where?. I would like to investigate the historical geography of Syria to highlight resources and opportunities that explain the geographic spread of the protests.
I will focus on two geographical case studies. First, studying border-towns such as Jarablus and Tel Abyad underlines the different strategies that deployed its inhabitants: some chose to migrate to Lebanon in the Bekaa Valley, others moved to Tukey. This investigation will point out the specificity of living on a borderland territory in a period of crisis. Second, Palestinian inhabitants of different camps adopted several “repertoires of action”, to escape from the country. These strategies interacted with their own representation of being member of Syria, or defining themselves as Palestinian. Through this case study, questioning the migration highlights how State categories – being a Palestinian in Syria – are shaken/transformed and owned by the actors themselves.
Two main field studies can be conducted. I will pursue an ongoing campaign of interviews in Jordan, Iraqi Kurdistan, Lebanon, and Turkey, in order to characterize the choice of the displacement, and I will confront these experiments with those of displaced people who settle in Europe mainly Sweden and France. I would like to highlight the different registers of mental boundaries, or in other words, which (choice of) location is deemed suitable in a period of crisis.