Katrine Baunkjær is a PhD candidate in political science at Aarhus University. She holds a bachelor's and master's degree in political science from the University of Copenhagen. During her master’s studies, she was a visiting student at the American University of Beirut and conducted research on the Lebanese anti-sectarian student movement. She has worked for several years within the humanitarian sector in the MENA region.
In autumn 2026, she will be affiliated with the Orient-Institut Beirut and the American University of Beirut while conducting ethnographic fieldwork in different parts of Lebanon for her doctoral research.

Project description

Whose War? Everyday Practices of Security, Responsibility, and Belonging under Uneven Violence in Lebanon

The PhD project is an ethnographic study of everyday life during the current war in Lebanon. Based on fieldwork in local Lebanese communities, it examines how people live through and navigate a war that unfolds unevenly across society, producing different conditions of violence, displacement, and access to safety. Situated within political sociology and drawing on the fields of everyday sectarianism and critical security studies, the project explores how everyday practices of security-making, solidarity, and responses to displacement become sites where responsibility, social boundaries, and forms of belonging are negotiated and transformed.

Publications

Katrine Baunkjær & Regitze H. Rohlfing (2025) - Student movements as drivers of de-sectarianization in divided societies: the case of Lebanon’s Secular Club. Social Movement Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2025.2468208