Ebla Research Collective

Ebla’s mission is to provide locally grounded, collectively produced, globally engaged knowledge that is responsive to the needs of an unequal world. In the volatile and dynamic context of Arab countries, Ebla’s research is a space for exploring the possibilities and collective imaginaries at a moment of becoming and transformation. Our research gives voice to the priorities and concerns of people, particularly in the absence of democratic processes, bringing people together across spaces where divisions and antagonism are rife. Ebla is an alternative space for knowledge production locally oriented to: Understanding and documenting: To provide space and resources to understand the malaise of living in unequal societies, the mechanisms of oppression – and the many forms of resistance – particularly in turbulent and obscure moments. Envisioning: To support a learning process that captures alternative possibilities and collective imaginaries of a way forward, emerging from everyday lived realities. Engaging: To provide research that is both accessible and responsive. Accessible through publications in local languages and in multiple forms (media, including social media, podcasts, etc.) Responsive to the emergent realities of our communities by dialoguing with practitioners, policy makers, and activists at all stages of work. Theorizing: To contribute to theory that emerges from ‘below’, the empirical, and engages in discussion within the global south, but also speaks to the dominant theoretical tropes in the global North. Ebla Research Collective focuses on conflict and violence, including lived experience of violence, crisis, refugeehood, migration and precarity; environment with a focus on infrastructure, the management of and relations surrounding commons and natural resources; livelihoods and socio-political dynamics of economic policies and economic justice; and collective socio-political organizing at multiple scales and geographies.