Fabrice Balanche

Fabrice Balanche (born November 3, 1969, in Belfort, France) is a French geographer and specialist in the political geography and geopolitics of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the wider Middle East.

Biography

He completed his PhD under the supervision of Michaël F. Davie at the University of Tours in 2000 with a thesis on Les Alaouites, l'espace et le pouvoir dans la région côtière syrienne : une intégration nationale ambiguë.[1] He spent about ten years in Lebanon and Syria. From 2005 to 2011 he worked as a consultant on the preservation of water resources in Syria for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit.[2]

He joined the academic staff of the Lumière University Lyon 2 in 2007 and achieved habilitation there in 2013. He worked as a researcher for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy from 2015 to 2017 and was a visiting researcher at Stanford University's Hoover Institution from 2017 to 2018. He co-directed an observatory of Syrian (2018–2021) and Levantine affairs (2023–2025) for the Ministry of Armed Forces's Direction Générale des Relations Internationales et de la Stratégie.[2]

He was described by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as "one of the leading French experts on Syria".[3] He is regularly quoted in the written press on the subject of Syria,[4] in relation to his methods of mapping the Syrian civil war.[3][5][6][7]

In April 2025, he was prevented from completing a lecture at Lyon 2 University by a group of pro-Palestinian activists, who branded him a "Zionist" and a "terrorist". Balanche claimed afterwards that the action was provoked by his denunciation on CNews of the campus protests against a ban on holding an iftar in a university hall on the previous day, and described the activists as "Islamo-leftists". A group called Lyon-2 Autonome claimed responsibility for the incident and stated that it wanted Balanche to stop teaching at the university due to his "unacceptable" stances on Palestine and Syria, in an apparent reference to his 2016 meeting with Bashar al-Assad in Syria in the company of The Popular Right leader Thierry Mariani and journalist André Bercoff.[8][9][10] The Lyon public prosecutor's office opened an investigation for "obstructing the exercise of the teaching function."[8][11] Balanche was placed under "functional protection."[8][11][12]

Publications

Books

  • La région alaouite et le pouvoir syrien, Paris: Karthala, 2006, ISBN 978-2-84586-818-2.
  • Atlas du Proche-Orient Arabe, Paris: Sorbonne University Press and RFI, 2012, ISBN 978-284-050-7970.
  • Géopolitique du Moyen-Orient (Documentation photographique, no. 8102), Paris: Documentation française, 2014.
  • Sectarianism in Syria's Civil War: A Geopolitical Study Featuring 70 Original Maps, Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2018.
  • Syrie Liban : communautarisme et pouvoir, Hunningues: Presses Universitaires de Rhin et Danube, 2022.
  • Les leçons de la crise syrienne, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2024.

Edited journal issue

References

  1. ^ "Les Alaouites, l'espace et le pouvoir dans la région côtière syrienne : une intégration nationale ambiguë / Fabrice Balanche ; sous la dir. de Michaël Davie". University of Tours Library. Retrieved 27 January 2026.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)
  2. ^ a b "Fabrice Balanche". HAL (open archive). Archived from the original on 18 November 2025. Retrieved 27 January 2026.
  3. ^ a b "The Political Geography of Syria's War: An Interview With Fabrice Balanche". 2015-01-30. Retrieved 2017-02-22.
  4. ^ "Alep: pourquoi les rebelles ont-ils perdu ?" (in French). 2016-12-14. Retrieved 2017-02-22.
  5. ^ géopolitique, Steve Nadjar, Journaliste Responsable contenu du site/Spécialisé en. "Fabrice Balanche, géographe spécialiste de la Syrie: " L'utopie mobilisatrice des djihadistes demeure la destruction d'Israël "". Actualités Juives (in French). Archived from the original on 2017-02-22. Retrieved 2017-02-22.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  6. ^ "Syrie: "Il est trop tôt pour parler de tournant", estime Fabrice Balanche" (in French). 2012-07-17. Retrieved 2017-02-22.
  7. ^ "Daech espère des représailles contre les musulmans". 24 heures. Retrieved 2017-02-22.
  8. ^ a b c "A l'université Lyon-II, des étudiants traitent un professeur de « sioniste » et empêchent la tenue de son cours" (in French). 2025-04-04. Retrieved 2025-04-06.
  9. ^ Heller, Mathilda (7 April 2025). "'Zionist, terrorist': Masked pro-Palestinian mob forces French geographer out of lecture". The Jerusalem Post. Archived from the original on 7 April 2025. Retrieved 27 January 2026.
  10. ^ Salvi, Ellen (28 March 2016). "L'ultradroite française en week-end chez Bachar al-Assad". Mediapart (in French). Retrieved 27 January 2026.
  11. ^ a b "Pris à partie en plein cours, un professeur d'université placé sous protection". Le HuffPost (in French). 2025-04-04. Retrieved 2025-04-06.
  12. ^ Atlantico (2025-04-05). "Fabrice Balanche : « L'extrême gauche fait le nid de l'islam politique à l'université »". Atlantico (in French). Retrieved 2025-04-06.
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