Roula Abi Habib Khoury is a sociologist, director of the Centre d’Etudes pour le Monde Arabe Moderne (CEMAM) and professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Saint Joseph University in Beirut. She specializes in sociological theory and her research focuses on the sociology of the Lebanese society. She worked extensively on the concepts of gratuity, gift and on numerous aspects of non-utilitarian social relations. She is currently leading two large-scale projects on the memory of the Lebanese war through musical production and on the Youth in the Arab World. She is presently completing a manuscript on the notion of frontiers in border regions in Lebanon within a CEMAM research project entitled “Le Liban aux nombreuses frontières”.