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Join Professor Ghassan Salamé for his Lecture on ‘Lessons from 2003 Iraq: Twenty Years Later’

Jointly organised by Invisible East and St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, with the generous support of the Middle East Centre, the Reza Hosseini Memorial Lecture Series connects individual stories to larger questions on the history and contemporary issues of the Middle East. The series aims to recognise and promote, in particular, micro-histories, oral and documentary history, and fieldwork analysis.

The series honours the life and work of Reza Hosseini (1960-2003) who last served as Humanitarian Officer in Iraq. The series is launched on the 20th anniversary of the attack on the United Nations Headquarters in Baghdad on 19 August 2003 which killed Reza and 21 colleagues.

Biography

Ghassan Salamé is a professor of International Relations at Sciences-Po (Paris) and the founding Dean of its Paris School of International Affairs/PSIA.

From 2000–2003 he was Lebanon’s Minister of Culture, in charge of national heritage and the arts. He was also Chairman of the Committee and Spokesman for the Arab Summit in March 2002 and for the Francophone Summit in October 2002. Salamé was Political Advisor to the UN Mission in Iraq in 2003 and Senior Advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General from 2003–2005, and once again in 2012.

He is presently Vice-Chairman of the Board of the International Crisis Group and sits on the board of the Open Society Institute. He was given the Phenix, ADELFI and Al-Idrissi awards, as well as the Medaille of the Academie Francaise in 2003. Salamé was made Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur in 2004 and named ‘The Arab Cultural Personality of the Year’ the same year.

He has a PhD in Literature and a PhD in Politics from Paris I University, as well as a master’s degree in Lebanese and French law.