About

Rana B. Khoury is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Illinois College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. She is also affiliated with the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Her research focuses on civil society, humanitarian response, and political organization in conflict settings, with particular attention to Syria. Khoury has contributed to understanding the role of civil organizing in war, the dynamics of Syrian Facebook communities, and the challenges of reaching hard-to-access populations in conflict zones. Her work emphasizes the importance of local responses and civil society in shaping political and humanitarian outcomes in war-torn regions.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Political economy
• Computer Science
• Law
• Public relations
• Development economics
• Geography
• Economic geography
• Mathematics
• Statistics
• Economics
• Computer vision
• Gender studies
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Civilizing Contention

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2025-01-01

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Why Syria's Civil Society is the Key

  Journal of democracy · 2025-03-27 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: Syria's best asset for an inclusive, transparent, and participatory political transition is its civil society. During years of uprising and war, citizens built diverse initiatives to achieve political change, raise awareness, pursue justice, and provide humanitarian relief. Today, organizations inside and outside the country have the capacity, experience, and will to push for democracy. They are already doing so by mobilizing pressure to demand accountability; cultivating democratic citizenship; channeling expertise to resolve key state challenges; and helping to alleviate the population's dire material needs. International parties must follow the lead of the Syrian grassroots and support their priorities and work.

  PublisherDOI

• Sampling Hard-to-Reach Populations

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Statistics
  • Computer Science

  Abstract Who is hard to reach, how do we access them, and should we? This chapter describes the characteristics of hard-to-reach or “hidden” populations, barriers to reaching them, and the meaning of sampling in social science research. It reviews qualitative approaches to identifying, accessing, and gaining the trust of hard-to-reach populations. Snowball sampling is an efficient and reliable technique for interview research, while ethnographic approaches can achieve unique access in challenging contexts. Finally, the chapter considers some problems and trade-offs that arise in studying these populations, emphasizing data limitations and saturation. Ethical considerations guide much of the chapter, given that hard-to-reach populations are often, but not always, vulnerable ones.

  PublisherDOI

• Civil Organizing in War: Evidence from Syrian Facebook Communities

  Perspectives on Politics · 2024-12-26 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Where, when, and why do civilians organize during war? We propose a research agenda that expands the scope of variation in civil organizing and identify mechanisms to explain its emergence and evolution. Drawing on a large-scale original dataset of public Facebook posts produced by Syrian organizations from 2011 to 2020 and qualitative case studies based on 10 months of field research among Syrian activists in Turkey and Jordan, we systematically examine geographic, temporal, and substantive variation in civil organizing. We find that civil organizing can persist in the face of ongoing violence and displacement, focusing not only on concerns of protection and survival, but also on governance and even contentious politics. This organizing increasingly shifts from within Syria to border states, with translocal organizations—operating both inside and outside Syria—playing a particularly active role. This work contributes to literature on conflict processes and contentious politics by emphasizing the importance of organizations, centering refugees and civilians as agential and strategic actors, and using novel evidence to describe variation in wartime organizing over time and space.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Going local without localization: Power and humanitarian response in the Syrian war

  World Development · 2023 · 31 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  International aid organizations and donors have committed to localize aid by empowering local actors to deliver and lead in humanitarian response. While international actors do often rely on local actors for aid delivery, their progress on shifting authority falls short. Scholars suggest that while localizing aid may be desirable, the organizational imperatives of international actors and aid’s colonial past and present make it difficult at best. Can localization efforts produce locally led humanitarian response? Adopting a power framework, we argue that localization reinforces and reproduces international power; through institutional processes, localization efforts by international actors allocate capacity to, and constitute local actors as, humanitarians that are more or less capable, funded, and involved in responding to crises in the latter’s own countries. This article interprets aid efforts during the Syria War. In this crucial case, we might expect localization to be “easy” due to the dependence of international actors on local actors because of security concerns and constraints on international access. We draw on fine-grained qualitative data collected through immersive observation and 250 interviews with Syrian and international aid workers in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, as well as descriptive analysis of quantitative data. We reveal the ways Syrians were constituted as frontline responders, recipients of funds or trainings, risk-takers, gateways to access, and tokenistic representatives of the crisis. Our research shows that while the response seemed to “go local” by relying on the labor and risk-taking of Syrians to implement relief, it did not transfer authority to Syrian actors. Findings contribute to current debates in global development and humanitarian scholarship about who holds power within the global aid architecture.

  PublisherDOI

• Migration and Displacement

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Abstract This chapter shows why the large-scale movement of human populations in the MENA has manifest importance to states and societies across the region. Whether driven by economic concerns, violence, or some combination of the two, the migration of peoples—which, in its most tragic form, produces refugee crises—has become an indelible part of the regional landscape. The chapter traces the history of such migration prior to the Arab uprisings and locates the applicability of outside literatures to help understand the experiences of migrants and refugees. Research on the relationship between conflict and migration, labor migration, state-level governance of migration, global governance and international institutions, and the nexus between diasporas and states all receive close attention. The ethics of studying displaced communities also invokes discussion. Key debates, notable cases, and avenues for future research are hence mapped out in systematic detail.

  PublisherDOI

• RDS_readme.rtf

  Harvard Dataverse · 2020-01-01

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Read.Me

  PublisherDOI

• RDS_replication_log.R

  Harvard Dataverse · 2020-01-01

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  R log file

  PublisherDOI

• RDS_codebook.pdf

  Harvard Dataverse · 2020-01-01

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Codebook

  PublisherDOI

• rds_replication_data.tab

  Harvard Dataverse · 2020-01-01

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Replication data

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Emily Scott

  2 shared

• Alexandra Siegel

  University of Colorado System

  1 shared

• Wendy Pearlman

  University of Salzburg

  1 shared

• Lama Mourad

  1 shared

• Laurie A. Brand

  University of Southern California

  1 shared

• Filippo Dionigi

  University of Bristol

  1 shared

• Géraldine Chatelard

  Institut français du Proche-Orient

  1 shared

• Noora Lori

  1 shared

Labs

• System Credentials Working GroupPI