This website is the first comprehensive digital archive of the published writings of Fawwaz Traboulsi (فواز طرابلسي) — historian, translator, journalist, and one of the Arab world’s foremost public intellectuals. It brings together hundreds of texts, written across more than five decades, in Arabic, English, and French — many of them previously scattered across defunct newspapers, out-of-print journals, and hard-to-access academic publications.
The archive is intended for anyone seeking to engage seriously with the political, historical, and cultural questions that have shaped the modern Arab world. Whether you are a researcher tracing the intellectual history of the Arab left, a student encountering Traboulsi’s work for the first time, or a reader looking for incisive analysis of Lebanon, Palestine, or the region, this collection is designed to be open, searchable, and free.
What the Archive Contains
The collection brings together writings, talks, and interviews in Arabic, English, and French. New records continue to be added.
These writings take many forms: articles, academic papers, lectures, book reviews, interviews, editorials, biographical and commemorative essays, translations, prefaces, memoirs, and debates. Each text is available in its original language of publication. Switching between the English and Arabic interfaces changes navigation, labels, and available title or summary fields; it does not translate the article body. Originals in all three languages appear together in the archives, with a content-language filter when needed.
The archive also catalogues Traboulsi’s books — with cover images, publication details, and links to related prefaces, excerpts, and reviews — and hosts a growing multimedia collection, including filmed lectures, television interviews, and panel discussions.
Subjects and Scope
Traboulsi’s writings engage with the major political, historical, and cultural questions of the modern Arab world. The archive’s thematic range includes:
- Politics — Lebanese confessional politics, the Arab left, democracy and authoritarianism, the 2011 Arab uprisings and their aftermath
- History — Modern Lebanon from the Ottoman period to the present, the Palestinian question, anticolonial movements from Dhofar to Algeria
- Art and Literature — Cultural criticism, the Rahbani–Fairuz theatrical tradition, cinema, poetry, and popular culture
- Political Economy — Neoliberal restructuring in the Arab world, class formation, Gulf capital, sectarianism as an economic system
- International Relations — Cold War alignments, the Gulf wars, Western policy in the Middle East, solidarity movements
Geographically, the writings address Lebanon most extensively, alongside sustained engagement with Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Algeria, Iran, and the broader Arab world.
Original Publications
The texts in this archive were originally published in a wide range of outlets, including:
- As-Safir (السفير) — Lebanon’s flagship progressive daily, where Traboulsi wrote a regular column for decades until the paper’s closure in 2016
- Bidayat (بدايات) — the quarterly pan-Arab political and cultural review he founded in 2012
- Al-Quds Al-Arabi, Al-Akhbar, and other Arabic-language dailies
- New Left Review, Middle East Report, Middle East Critique, Jacobin, Jadaliyya, and other English-language academic and political journals
How to Use the Archive
The archive is designed for both focused research and open exploration:
- Browse by theme — Explore writings on politics, history, art, political economy, and more
- Browse by region — Filter by country or geographic focus
- Browse by type — Find articles, papers, interviews, lectures, book reviews, and other formats
- Search — Use the search bar to look for specific topics, people, events, or keywords across all texts
- Filter and combine — Use sidebar filters on archive pages to narrow results by theme, region, type, or era
Use Explore to search across writings and media. Writings, Talks & Interviews, Books, and In The Media provide focused catalogues. The glossary and periodical collections offer additional ways into the archive. Saved Sets lets you collect references in your browser.
About This Project
This archive is a work in progress. It represents the most comprehensive publicly accessible collection of Traboulsi’s published writings, but it is not exhaustive. Some earlier texts — particularly from the 1960s and 1970s, published in periodicals that no longer exist — have not yet been located or digitised. The collection continues to grow as new materials are identified and added.