For a long time, higher education has been absent from research and policy priorities in the field of education, conflict and peacebuilding.  This is now changing but it remains within an economic paradigm that focuses almost exclusively on questions of access and human capital, marginalising the political significance of universities in contexts of conflict and post-conflict recovery.  At the same time, there is an under-theorisation of the political dimensions of universities, including the question of what makes a university ‘public’ in a political democratic sense.  Overlooked in theory, disregarded in policymaking, and largely ignored in research and practice, this paper makes the case for re-centring the ‘publicness’ of universities in societies affected by conflict. Following the history of the national university in Lebanon over a period of 60 years, through periods of social and political transformation, protracted civil war and post-war neoliberal reconstruction, it sheds light on the evolving ‘publicness’ of Lebanon’s only public university. This longue durée perspective points to both the democratic significance and precarity of the Lebanese University in a society divided by war, highlighting the ways in which its publicness has been continually constructed and contested in the face of relentless political and economic neglect by the state. 

Drawing on narrative research interviews with current and former university students, faculty and administrators, conducted between 2017 and 2019, along with extracts from newspaper archives stretching back over 50 years, the evolving publicness of the Lebanese University is discussed in a dialogue with political theory.  From Mahdi Amel’s (1968) observation that the Lebanese University was an arena for clashing hegemonic and counter-hegemonic interests to Bonnie Honig’s (2017) argument that ‘Public Things’ are vital objects for societal conflict, this paper goes beyond economistic and instrumentalist understandings of what makes a university ‘public’ to consider the publicness of universities. The suffix ‘ness’ denotes a spectrum – that universities can be more or less public, their publicness is not fixed but fragile, closely relating to wider conditions and struggles for democracy.

Helen Murray is a Research Fellow at the Centre for International Education, University of Sussex. She works with the Political Economy of Education Research Network (PEER), a 3-year collaboration between the Universities of Cape Town, Nazarbayev, Sussex and Ulster, aiming to strengthen critical political economy analyses of education systems in societies affected by conflict.  In 2021 she completed her ESRC-funded PhD on the topic of ‘Universities, Conflict and the Public Sphere: Trajectories of the Public University in Lebanon’.  Prior to this, Helen worked for 15 years on issues of education justice, conflict and development. Her particular interest in higher education was ignited by experiences of studying and later working at Birzeit University in Palestine, where she coordinated the Right to Education Campaign between 2004-2006.  She has subsequently worked for a range of local and international organisations in policy, programming and research roles, most recently the Open Society Foundations, where she was engaged with OSF’s education and higher education work.