CPS congratulates our former Ibrahim Abu-Lughod fellow, Nathaniel George, on the publications of two new articles. Nate is Lecturer in Politics of the Middle East, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London.
“Survival in an Age of Revolution”: Charles Malik, Philo-Colonialism, and Global Counterrevolution
The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 2, June 2025, Pages 600–637, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaf007
ABSTRACT While great effort has been invested in analyzing the role of revolutionary intellectuals in history, much less attention has been paid to the counterrevolution and its guides. This is especially the case in the former colonial world in the era of decolonization, where anticolonial politics are often portrayed as having been the default position. Lebanese philosopher and statesman Charles Malik was a candid opponent of what he theorized as the “great Asian and African revolution” against imperial rule. Instead, he advocated consciously counterrevolutionary politics that sought to purify the corruptions of “collectivism, materialism, and secularism” brought forward by an age of anticolonial and socialist revolutions. Primarily known as a principal author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it was in the Lebanese arena that his global political commitments were most directly expressed. This included his decisive role in securing US military intervention during Lebanon’s 1958 civil war, and more fundamentally in his founding role in the Front for Freedom and Man in Lebanon (FFML), the counterrevolutionary, Christian-supremacist alliance in Lebanon’s international civil war (1975–90). Malik’s praxis highlights an overlooked philo-colonial trend in the era of decolonization: native advocates for continued imperial sovereignty over a dependent and rigidly stratified nation-state without equal citizenship. Malik’s ideological and material entanglements on multiple scales foreground the defining part of counterrevolutionary networks in shaping the global history of twentieth century and its inheritance.
‘The Lebanese Front of the War for Palestine,’ a short piece contextualizing Israel’s most recent war on Lebanon in a Cultural Anthropology Hot Spot (2025)
