The diplomat

Tunis and Cairo

Nassif Hitti joined the League of Arab States in 1981, when its seat was in Tunis after the Camp David accords. When the League returned to Cairo he served as diplomatic adviser to the Secretary-General through the 1990s - the decade after the second Gulf War and the Madrid conference, which his columns would later identify as the beginning of the Arab regional order's transformation.

Ottawa

From 1985 to 1990 he was posted to the League's office in Canada, his first experience of representing the Arab world in a Western capital.

Paris and UNESCO

From 2000 he headed the Arab League Mission in Paris and was its Permanent Observer to UNESCO. The Paris years combined diplomacy with an academic and media presence in France, and are the source of his sustained interest in the Euro-Mediterranean space and Arab-European relations.

Rome and the Holy See

As the League's ambassador to Italy and to the Vatican he worked on the dialogue of religions and civilisations - a theme that recurs in his columns whenever he rejects the 'clash of civilisations' and replaces it with a 'clash of ignorances'.

The Foreign Ministry

On 21 January 2020, amid the popular uprising and the financial collapse, he became Minister of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants in the government of Hassan Diab. On 3 August 2020 he resigned, saying that he had joined 'to work for one employer named Lebanon' and had found 'many employers with contradictory interests'. The full statement is in the Documents section.