Trained as a political scientist and as an Arabic philologist, and having resided for years in Egypt, Syria and Tunisia, Laura Ruiz de Elvira is a research fellow at the IRD (Ceped, Université Paris Cité). She received her PhD with distinction from the EHESS (Paris) and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2013. A specialist in charitable practices, social policies, social movement studies, and authoritarianism, particularly in Syria and Tunisia, she is the Principal Investigator of the ERC StG project LIVE - AR (The Subsequent Lives of Arab Revolutionaries). She has co-edited Les mondes de la bien-faisance (CNRS Editions, 2021) and Clientelism and Patronage in the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge, 2018). She is also the author of Vers la fin du contrat social en Syrie (Karthala, 2019) and Civil Society and the State in Syria: The Outsourcing of Social Responsibility (Lynne Rienner, 2012; with Tina Zintl).