Dr Billie Jeanne Brownlee

BA, MA (Ca' Foscari, Venice), PhD, Postdoc (Exeter)

email: B.J.Brownlee@exeter.ac.uk

Extension: 01392 724873

Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics

I am a political scientist working on media, displacement, social movements, and political mobilisation and culture in the Middle East. I have carried out extensive research across the MENA region, with periods of fieldwork in Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Turkey. I am keen in the interconnection betwen local and global politics; and in the overlapping of fields of research between media, displacement, and politics. 

I am happy to supervise projects relevant to the above field, including in a comparative framework or connection with other global South cases, such as South and Central America, South and East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

I am author of two monograph books: the first is New Media and Revolution: Resistance and Dissent in pre-Uprising Syria (published by McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020).  In this book I provide an alternative approach to the study of the Syrian uprising by examining the impact that the development of the new media had in reconstructing forms of collective action and social mobilisation in authoritarian settings like Syria. Although my area of research is the Middle East, I have not isolated my focus to this region only but I have drawn comparative lines with the “Arab Spring” phenomenon and its local ecologies of protest and with its global counterparts that in the past decade have seen citizens empowered by new media technologies in their struggle against authoritarian rule, economic austerity, and social inequality.

My second monograph is States without People: revolt and defeat in the Middle East (published by McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025, co-authored with Professor Maziyar Ghiabi). The book explores what happens the defeat of popular mobilisation, and it argues that defeat has led to the rise of 'the culture of the right' in a context of civil war and mass-scale displacement, where the notion of citizenship has come under enormous pressures and shifts in political culture.

My work has been supported by the UKRI-ESRC Global Challenges Research Fellowship, while I also have experience with working in international organisations and developmental agencies such as EEAS in Brussles, the Italian Development Cooperation Aid in Jerusalem, and Italian Embassy in Jerusalem. 

My current focus is on two main lines of inquiry: firstly, I am developing a region-wide project on right-wing political movements across the MENA region (and their connections with European, American as well as global South groups).

The second is an interdisciplinary project (with other collaborators) on the governance of internet-based and social media harms in the Middle East.

That said, I am nonetheless continuing my work on the refugee crisis which has been a significant part of my academic work withr eference to the wider Mediterranean basin. Although episodes of forced migration are not new in this part of the world, today the MENA region is experiencing an unprecedented number of refugees and economic migrants. The Global Challenge ESRC postdoctoral fund allowed me to conduct extensive research on the micro-politics of refugee crisis management in Lebanon, meaning understanding the role that municipalities have played in responding to the refugee crisis. Beyond the intellectual value of this study, the research has more practical aspirations, namely identifying a model of grassroots and bottom-up refugee management in Lebanon aimed at ‘localising’ the response, transforming local authorities and the territory into catalysts for change.

Biography:

I received my PhD in Middle East Politics from the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter in 2016. My doctoral research examined the impact that the development of new media had in reconstructing forms of collective action and popular mobilisation in Syria. By working on a situation of political unrest and competing political mobilisations, I have acquired valuable experience in dissecting and producing scholarly work in contexts where research is otherwise seen as difficult, problem-ridden and inaccessible. Fieldwork was in fact conducted in Syria and the neighbouring countries of Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. In these countries, I undertook extensive field observation, interviewing media professionals, activists, international stakeholders and local institutions supporting media literacy projects.

The end of my thesis research released further intellectual and investigative energies, which have been inspiring for several new projects. I have worked as a Teaching Fellow at the University of Bath between 2015-2017, teaching courses in Middle East Politics and International Relation Theories at the University of Bath. In 2017, I won the Global Challenges ESRC Postdoctoral Fund at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. The research on The Micro-politics of the refugee crisis management: the case of Lebanon’s municipalities looks at the politics of response to the refugee crisis at municipal and district level in Lebanon in order to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of humanitarian response and provide stakeholders with on-the-ground knowledge of the political dimension of the refugee phenomenon in Lebanon.

Beside my academic experience, I have worked in non-academic environment like the Italian Development Cooperation in Jerusalem between 2011-2012 and the European External Action Service (EEAS), Crisis Response Unit in Brussels between 2014-2015. My interest in the topic of refugees and migration issues, which shaped my postdoctoral research, was influenced by these two job experiences, having to work on the displacement of the Palestinian people in the first place and on Syrian refugees at the EEAS.

Research supervision:

Students willing to pursue research on the following topics are welcome to get in touch with me:

digital media

social movement

protests, revolts, uprisings

dispalcement, migration, diaspora

right-wing politics

comparative studies between MENA and global South

Current and Past doctoral students:

Vito Morisco (w Lise Storm) : Relational Radicalisation and Deraadicalization within Movement Parties: Hezbollah and Hamas

Areej Jafari (w Ilan Pappe): The implications of refugee preferences on return: the case of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict

Sahar Alnaas (w Ella Gao): Libyan women between victimhood and agency: democracy, conflict and gender politics

Kinan Noah (w Christine Robins): Identity representations in the narratives of Syrian forced migrants

Heidi Affi (w William Gallois and Laleh Khalili): 

Elisabeth Nicollss (w Adam Hanieh): 

Melissa Verbeek (w Ricardo Safra de Campos)