Erminia Chiara Calabrese is a sociologist.  Her research interests focus on sociology of collective action, sociology of political violence and war, and sociology of political Islam.  Based on an ethnographic approach, she first examined militant engagement within Hezbollah in the southern suburbs of Beirut by favoring a processual approach anchored in daily life and within family spaces. Then she oriented her research on the war experiences between Syria and Lebanon by highlighting the porosities between the front and domestic spaces and the ways in which these two spaces nourish each other. During these different projects, through a multivariate analysis articulating micro (individual), meso (institutions, political parties) and macrosociological (state, societies) levels, she tried to anchor these militant and/or warrior experiences not only in their collective, institutional and political dimension, but also in their individual and subjective dimension, with particular attention paid to the experiences but also to the evolutions and transformations of the intimate (love and marital bonds, self-perception, faith, utopias, masculinity).

In the context of the collective program "Futures Interrupted" she analyses what war implies and produces at the level of political engagement, utopias and socialisations through an ethnographic study among women and men of South Lebanon following the latest Israeli war on Lebanon started in October 2024.  In particularly, she will analyse what happens in the political trajectories of individuals living through and enduring a war and to how it translates into the relationship with political projects, utopias and intergenerational transmission of the political heritage at a time when ideals, dreams and “causes” are being put into tension and losing their meaning in the facing of destruction, death and defeats.