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The Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL), in partnership with the Educational Bookshop, are pleased to share this discussion with Dr Mahmood Mamdani about his new book “Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities.” The book offers original arguments regarding the co-constitutive relationship between the nation-state and the colonial state. According to...

Current global climatic and ecological changes present a profound threat to the long-term wellbeing of humanity. Solutions to mitigate against or adapt to society’s grand sustainability challenge will come from many quarters – science and technology, humanities and the creative arts, health, business and education – but the historical sciences of archaeology and geology also offer important past p...

This webinar, co-hosted by the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) and the British Institute at Ankara, will showcase the latest debates and scholarship on modern and contemporary feminist art practices and histories from the Middle East and Turkey. The panellists will share their perspectives on feminist art in Syria, Turkey and Palestine. Dr Charlotte Bank will discuss feminist app...

This webinar will investigate the development of complex societies in the Lebanese coastal zone during the Early Bronze Age (EBA). New evidence shows that coastal Lebanon, with its unique mountainous setting and ample water resources, developed a distinct pathway to complexity. Dr Kamal Badreshany will discuss ceramic and architectural evidence from recently excavated sites in the region to assess...

In this roundtable event, Islah Jad, Sara Ababneh and Nicola Pratt discuss women’s activism in the Levant, with a focus on Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon. Based on their respective research in this area, they explore how women’s activism has emerged and changed over time, its relationship to nationalism and state-building, to feminism, international hegemonic discourses on women's rights and develo...

A projecting western spur of Mount Lebanon adjacent to the Ibrahim or Adonis river, the Jabal Moussa Biosphere Reserve possesses a rich natural and cultural heritage. Given its relative inaccessibility and difficult terrain, what is perhaps most remarkable is the long continuity of human adaptation and occupation of this mountain landscape.  This talk presents the results of an ongoing collaborati...

With Dr Gerasimos Tsourapas, University of Birmingham 15 November 2020 How do states’ foreign policy goals affect their policies towards refugees? What is the impact of forced displacement on host states’ political development? Gerasimos Tsourapas draws on elite interviews conducted across Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis to examine the particularities of migr...

A Commerce of Knowledge, authored by Simon Mills, tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Syria during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reconstructing the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of Ottoman Aleppo, the book investigates the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion, and Englis...

A thought-provoking discussion, chaired by Venetia Porter, Curator of Islamic & Contemporary Middle East Art at the British Museum (currently on furlough), with Scott Redford, Professor of Islamic Art & Archaeology at SOAS, and Diana Darke, author of this new book. Described by The Guardian as “exhilarating and meticulously researched”, the book has created something of a stir, roundly attacked on...

According to common perception, the Federal Republic of Germany supported the formation of the Israeli state for moral reasons—to atone for its Nazi past—but did not play a significant role in the Arab–Israeli conflict. However, the historical record does not sustain this narrative.  Daniel Marwecki’s pathbreaking analysis deconstructs the myths surrounding the odd alliance between Israel and post...

People have complex relationships with the environments they live in and resources such as water and food are critical variables in societal landscapes, with resource scarcity potentially leading to instability or collapse. In the Levant, with its long history of human occupation and evolution, human-climate-environment interactions have been important for millennia, such that issues of resource a...

Slides to accompany this event can be found here: https://cbrl.ac.uk/ckeditor/filemanager/userfiles/Events/Was_the_Black_desert_green_during_the_late_Neolithic/Collated_presentations.pdf Today, Jordan’s Black Desert is an area of volcanic rocks that lie above the limestones of the Transjordan plateau stretching from Jebel Druze, south-east of Damascus, across eastern Jordan and into northern Saudi...

Since the 1990s, Palestinian theatrical activities in the West Bank have expanded exponentially. In addition to local productions, Palestinian theatre-makers have presented their work to international audiences on a scale unprecedented in Palestinian history. Author Gabriel Varghese’s Palestinian Theatre in the West Bank explores the histories of the five major theatre companies currently working...

Lebanon is facing its worst financial crisis since independence. The government has defaulted on its ballooning public debt, high inflation is the new norm, much needed US dollars are in shortage, and thousands of bank account holders are denied their right to withdraw money. The central bank is accused of hiding real losses and appeasing rather than holding politicians and bankers accountable. Ne...

How do aspiring and established rising global powers respond to conflict? Since the People’s Republic was established in 1949, China has long been involved in the Middle East and its conflicts, from exploiting or avoiding them, to their management, containment or resolution. This webinar will examine China’s engagement with the region’s conflicts including: Israel/Palestine; Iraq before and after...

This webinar explores the roots and implications of Israel’s plans to annex up to a third of West Bank territory – a manoeuvre seen by many to represent a paradigmatic shift in the character of how the ‘Israel-Palestine’ conflict hereafter unfolds. Professor Shlaim - a leading scholar of Israel’s relations with the Arab world - will be interviewed by CBRL Kenyon Institute, Jerusalem Director Dr To...

This talk will look at how Arabs established a democratic government at Damascus in 1919-20 by forging a compromise between secular liberals, conservative Muslims, and leaders of non-Muslim communities as described in How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs. However, the Paris Peace Conference refused to recognize Arab democracy because it threatened British and French colonial rule in other M...

As the discourse of “Countering Violent Extremism” has become more prominent both within the Middle East and in talk about the Middle East, so too has the concept of moderation emerged as an apparent interpretive key to understanding the region and its most pressing political and theological debates. Yet if the definition of ‘extremism’ remains controversial, the concept of moderation is all too o...

In this seminar we invite discussion on the nature of partnership building in and around the museum and heritage sector in Jordan. We reflect on our own experiences of trying to develop successful partnerships, gained during the first year of our AHRC Newton-Khalidi funded research-and-development project on ‘Learning from Multicultural Amman: Engaging Jordan’s Youth’. Here, as well as thinking cr...

This talk surveys the first two decades of British rule in Palestine through the eyes of its intelligence services. Who were Britain’s spymasters in Palestine? How did they try to reconcile Britain’s conflicting promises to Zionists and Palestinians? Did they understand the country and its people, or did they get it wrong? This talk shows the moments where intelligence officers influenced British...

This event will explore the implications of the global Covid-19 crisis on the future of neoliberalism, and the ongoing struggles across the Middle East and North Africa, informally referred to as the 'Arab Spring'. This event will take the format of a conversation with Prof. Achcar, led by Dr. Toufic Haddad, Director of CBRL-Jerusalem's Kenyon Institute, and will include the chance for webinar aud...

The twentieth century for Palestine and the Palestinians has been a century of denial: denial of statehood, denial of nationhood and denial of history. This book is Rashid Khalidi’s powerful response. Drawing on his family archives, he reclaims the fundamental right of any people: to narrate their history on their own terms. In this book launch, Prof. Khalidi (Columbia University) discusses his bo...

Slides to accompany this audio are available here: https://cbrl.ac.uk/ckeditor/filemanager/userfiles/Events/Salman_Abu_Sitta_SWP/Salman_Abu_Sitta_slides_SOAS_event_February_2020.pdf The Survey of Western Palestine (SWP), conducted between 1871 and 1878 and first published in 1880, was considered the first scientifically based comprehensive survey of Palestine and it was unequalled for its time. It...

President Donald Trump’s proposal for peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples under the spotlight at an event hosted by King’s Decolonising Working Group at King’s College London. Trump’s Peace Plan: A First Reading, a seminar led by Dr Toufic Haddad. Dr Haddad is the director for the Council for British Research in the Levant’s Kenyon Institute, based in East Jerusalem. He is the author...

Sharing Passions: discovery, documentation and the destruction of cultural heritage in the Middle East and North Africa.  A tribute to Dr Andrea Zerbini (1984-2019)    Slides of this lecture to accompany the audio recording can be found here: https://cbrl.ac.uk/event/discovery-documentation-and-the-destruction-of-cultural-heritage-in-the-mena-region Archaeologists thrive on discovering places, obj...