The 1997 Michel Seurat Grant was awarded to Philipp Droz-Vincent for his research on "Urban elites in the Levant: the cases of Jordan and Syria". The grant was awarded by Marie-Claude Maurel, director of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, on April 2, 1998, during an official ceremony at CNRS headquarters.

The Michel Seurat grant (100,000 FF) was created by the CNRS in June 1988 " as a tribute to the memory of Michel Seurat, a CNRS researcher in Islamic studies who died in tragic circumstances. The grants are awarded to young French or Near-Eastern researchers, in the aim of promoting mutual knowledge and understanding between French and Arab cultures ". The researchers must be working in the field of " contemporary societies and cultures in the Near East ".
The Levant is a geographical area bounded north by the Turkish and Kurdish territories, east by Iran, south by the Arabian peninsula and west by Egypt. Geographers have named this area the " Fertile Crescent ". There are several big cities and the population is mostly Sunni. Owing to the administrative reforms of the Ottoman empire, urban elites (of different types depending on the area) developed in the cities. The term " elite " refers here to the classical concept of " strategic minorities " (a term coined by Raymond Aron), in other words, minorities which play a strategic role in the organization of society; the social structure must thus be described in terms more precise than a simple division into social classes, for instance. Important monographs have described this group — both the higher spheres, which play a leading role at the national level, and the local elites, acting as their intermediaries — , on which political regimes are entirely reliant.
Philippe Droz-Vincent has studied the emergence of the urban elite in that region, referring himself to the works of Albert Hourani on the political role of the elite at the end of the Ottoman Empire. He was thus able to determine the existence of a relatively stable group holding important administrative, political or economic positions in Syria, from the time of the Ottoman reforms up to the 1950s. In Jordan, the urban and landowner elite also emerged during the Ottoman period. Even though, at first, civil servants under King Abdallah were mainly Palestinian and Syrian, the local urban elite gradually gained power, especially in the 40s and 50s. Philippe Droz-Vincent focuses on the cases of Syria and Jordan, which he compares with Iraq and Egypt.

Philippe Droz-Vincent is writing a doctoral thesis on "The urban elites in the Levant: the cases of Jordan and Syria", under the supervision of Gilles Kepel and Ghassan Salamé, research directors at the CNRS (CERI, CNRS-FNSP, Institut d'études politiques de Paris), in the framework of the doctoral program "The Arab and Muslim world", at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris.

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