Riccardo Bocco is an Emeritus Professor of Political Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute. His main geographical area of fieldwork for the last 40 years has been the Near East (Jordan, Israel/Palestine, and Lebanon), and he has successively worked on issues of development policies and state-building; on humanitarian aid and refugees; and monitoring the impact of international aid on civilian populations. In addition to his Ph.D. at SciencesPo, Paris, he has degrees in cultural anthropology, development studies, and Arabic language. He has been director of the French Centre for Research on the Middle East (Amman), Research Director at the Graduate Institute of Development Studies (Geneva), and Director of Master Studies at the Graduate Institute. Since 2000, he has led large-scale research projects on international aid in the Near East for United Nations’ agencies. Since 2013, his research has focused on the relationships between violence, memory, and cinema, in particular the role of film directors and their movies in (re)constructing collective identities during armed conflicts (Israel/Palestine) in post-civil wars (Lebanon) and in post-dictatorship contexts (Argentina and Chile).