Meeting with Ziad Majed

Le Proche-Orient, mirror of the world Moderated by Hocine Ouazraf Le Proche-Orient is going through a period of major upheavals. Genocide underway in Gaza, regional tensions, political mutations in Syria, recompositions of power relations, and Israeli wars in Lebanon and Iran: recent events deeply question the evolution of the region and its repercussions on a global scale. How to understand these transformations? What do they reveal about the mutations of the international order, colonial legacies, and the new power dynamics that shape our era? In his work Le Proche-Orient, mirror of the world, Ziad Majed proposes keys to reading to grasp these complex issues. Through the analysis of 8 founding moments between 1915 and 2025, he retraces a century of history marked by political struggles, foreign interventions, and the profound recompositions that continue to transform the region. On the occasion of this meeting, the author will invite us to take an enlightened look at the contemporary history of the Middle East and at the challenges that cross this region today at the heart of global balances. About the author Ziad Majed is a Franco-Lebanese political scientist and professor of Middle Eastern studies at the American University of Paris. A specialist in political dynamics, social movements, and democratic transition processes in the Middle East, he regularly intervenes in international media to analyze the evolutions of the region. Author of numerous works and studies devoted to Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, he notably published Syrie, la révolution orpheline (Actes Sud, 2014) as well as Dans la tête de Bachar Al-Assad (with Subhi Hadidi and Farouk Mardam-Bey, Actes Sud, 2018, new edition 2025), and Le Proche-Orient, mirror of the world (La Découverte, 2025).