Born in Aleppo in 1946, Youssef Courbage graduated in Demography and Urban Planning at the Sorbonne and Dauphine Universities, France. In 1990 he was appointed as researcher then research director at the National Institute of Demographic Studies in Paris. He has been continuously a member of this Institute, except in 2003-2005 when he headed the Department of Contemporary Studies at the French Institute of the Near East (IFPO) in Beirut. His publications number more than 500 works (scholarly articles, reports and books), among which Al-Filastīniyyūn fī al-‘ālam, dirāsa dīmūghrāfiyya (The Palestinians in the World, a Demographic Study, Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies, 2020, with Hala Naufal) and A Convergence of Civilizations: The Transformation of Muslim Societies Around the World (Columbia University Press, 2007, with Emmanuel Todd).
