LSE Middle East Centre Podcasts

Speaker: Choukri Hmed, Paris Dauphine University Chair: John Chalcraft, LSE Tunisia is frequently known as the small “noiseless country” of the MENA that achieved its political transition and successfully managed to avoid civil war and authoritarian consolidation. Based on an ongoing fieldwork, Choukri Hmed presents his paper which, without undermining these political outcomes, proposes an analysi...

Speaker: Toby Dodge, LSE Middle East Centre Chair: Zeynep Kaya, LSE Middle East Centre Toby Dodge, MEC Director and Kuwait Professor, considers the reasons behind the rise of the Islamic State and its expansion, looking at the implications of intervention by both international and regional powers on Iraq. Recorded on 27 January 2016.

Speaker: Nicola Pratt, University of Warwick Chair: Aitemad Muhanna-Matar, LSE Oral history remains a largely untapped source in research on the Arab world. Simultaneously, women’s activism in the post-independence period remains relatively understudied, despite a heightened interest in women’s involvement in the Arab uprisings. Based on personal narratives of women activists of different generati...

Speaker: Madawi Al-Rasheed, LSE Middle East Centre Chair: Toby Dodge, LSE Middle East Centre Analysis of both official and opposition Saudi divine politics is often monolithic, conjuring images of conservatism, radicalism, misogyny and resistance to democracy. In this event, Madawi Al-Rasheed launches her new book in which she challenges this stereotype by examining a long tradition of engaging wi...

Speaker: Dina Esfandiary, King's College London Chair: Roham Alvandi, LSE With the July 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, attention has shifted to regional security. The rise of ISIS and the instability left behind by the Arab Spring has cemented dysfunction and chaos in the Middle East. Tackling it will require Iran’s help, or at the very least, its input. Dina Esfandiary discusses who makes fore...

Speaker: Abdulhadi Khalaf, Lund University Chair: John Chalcraft, LSE In this seminar, Abdulhadi Khalaf revisits the Bahraini trajectory of the Arab Spring. He examines the consequences of competition between moderate opposition networks and their diverse radical flanks. The paper argues that the positive roles of the radical flanks include developing new political opportunities and attracting new...

Speaker: Pejman Abdolmohammadi, LSE Middle East Centre Chair: Roham Alvandi, LSE In the last three years, the main focus of the international community and the media dealing with Iran has been the nuclear issue and Iranian foreign policy. Despite the relevance of these two elements, Pejman Abdolmohammadi argues that there is another paramount aspect which, in the next two decades, could have a cru...

Speaker: Daniel Neep, Georgetown University Chair: Toby Dodge, LSE Middle East Centre Why did Syria transition from a laissez-faire to a statist economy between 1946 and 1954? Existing scholarship proposes a political or class-based explanation: the anti-colonial old bourgeoisie that inherited power after independence was so discredited by its record of economic mismanagement, cronyism, and defeat...

Speaker: Toby Matthiesen, University of Oxford Chair: Toby Dodge, LSE Middle East Centre Toby Matthiesen launches his new book titled The Other Saudis: Shiism, dissent and sectarianism in which he traces the politics of the Shia in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia from the nineteenth century until the present day. The book outlines the difficult experiences of being Shia in a Wahhabi state, an...

Speaker: Ed McAllister, University of Oxford Chair: John King, Society for Algerian Studies From the perspective of a working-class Algiers neighbourhood, this talk looks at social memories of post-independence nation-building during the 1970s as reflections of the disappointments of the 1980s, the dislocation caused by civil war during the 1990s, and the reinforced state power and consumerism of...

Speaker: Sami Zemni, Middle East and North Africa Research Group Chair: John Chalcraft, LSE In this seminar, Sami Zemni presents his paper, co-written with Habib Ayeb, titled: Between Hegemony and Resistance: towards a moral economy of the Tunisian Revolution. The revolutionary upheavals in Tunisia and across the MENA which began in 2011 have fundamentally challenged the frameworks traditionally u...

Speakers: Fran Tonkiss, LSE; Dr Mona Khechen, AUB Chair: Romola Sanyal, LSE This event represents the culmination of a collaborative research project between LSE and the American University of Beirut. The event addresses current processes of urban development in Beirut, focusing on the Ras Beirut neighbourhood. In contrast to the well-established literature on gentrification in North American and...

Speakers: Martha Mundy, LSE; Rami Zurayk, American University of Beirut (AUB); Cynthia Gharios, AUB Chair: Michael Mason, LSE This event is the culmination of field research carried out over four years in collaboration with the American University of Beirut. Speaking to the work of the project ‘The Palimpsest of Agrarian Change’, Martha Mundy and Rami Zurayk and their colleagues Saker El-Nour and...

Speaker: Stéphane Lacroix, Sciences Po Chair: Toby Dodge, LSE On 3 July 2013, Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s guidance bureau and the first democratically elected president of Egypt, was overthrown by a military coup led by General Abdelfattah al-Sisi. Since then, the Muslim Brotherhood has been designated a terrorist organization and brutally repressed. In contrast, the Salafi...

Speaker: Frédéric Vairel, University of Ottawa Discussant: Nawal Mustafa, LSE Chair: John Chalcraft, LSE Frédéric describes how self-limitation works in contemporary Moroccan mobilisation, with particular reference to the 20th February Movement. In 2011, contestation dynamics did not reach national amplitude despite being spread across various parts of the country. Frédéric looks at the institutio...

Speaker: Frédéric Vairel, University of Ottawa Chair: John Chalcraft, LSE Most of the existing literature on the 2011 MENA uprisings looks in isolation at either the contentious politics of popular mobilisation or regime responses to them. Frédéric Vairel proposes a move away from this approach in order to understand the Moroccan case, instead considering both sides together by looking at the 20th...

Speaker: Claire Beaugrand, Institut Français du Proche Orient Discussant: Filippo Dionigi, LSE Middle East Centre Chair: John Chalcraft, LSE Bahrain has had a long history of exiling its opponents as a way to regulate political dissent. The 2011 political uprising in Bahrain marked a new phase in the history of Bahraini outmigration and exile politics. The brutal repression with which the protest...

Speaker: Jonathan Wyrtzen, Yale University Chair: Toby Dodge, LSE Against a dominant historical narrative emphasizing the importance of war-time agreements (Sykes-Picot and others) and the post-World War I peace settlement in "making" the modern Middle East, Jonathan wyrtzen shifts the focus to the post-war decade, examining a set of synchronic "revolts" in the mid-1920s from Morocco to Turkey tha...

Speaker: Lahouari Addi, Sciences Po Lyon Chair: John King, Society for Algerian Studies In this lecture, Professor Lahouari Addi discusses the current situation in Algeria, from the sickness and subsequent disappearance of Bouteflika from the public eye, to the protests in the south resisting the exploitation of the country's vast shale gas reserves and, importantly, the future of Algeria's econom...

Speaker: Marie Duboc, University of Tübingen Chair: John Chalcraft, LSE This talk focuses on labour protests in Egypt, before and after the fall of Hosni Mubarak. It argues that repression and radicalisation do not fully capture the dynamics of social movements in authoritarian contexts. Instead, it suggests to expand the contentious politics approach, the dominant theoretical framework used to st...

Speaker: Richard Schofield, King's College London Chair: Madawi Al-Rasheed, LSE Middle East Centre In trying to make sense of the spontaneous appearance of new borderland spatialities in Syria and Iraq, as well as recent instances of formal state boundary-making such as the Abyei arbitration, Richard Schofield asks what constitutes a borderland in the Middle East. Addressing both historical and co...

Speaker: Colonel Joel Rayburn, National Defense University Chair: Toby Dodge, LSE More than a decade after the US-led invasion of Iraq, most studies of the Iraq conflict focus on the twin questions of whether the United States should have entered Iraq in 2003 and whether it should have exited in 2011, but few have examined the new Iraqi state and society on its own merits. In this lecture, Joel Ra...

Speaker: Steven Heydemann, United States Institute of Peace Chair: Toby Dodge, LSE Middle East Centre How have the Arab Uprisings of 2011 affected authoritarian governance in the Arab world? How have Arab regimes responded to the distinctive challenges posed by the rapid emergence of oppositional forms of mass politics? What forms of authoritarian governance seem to be emerging in the wake of the...

Speaker: Steven Heydemann, United States Institute of Peace Chair: Toby Dodge, LSE As the Syrian conflict nears its fourth anniversary, it poses a growing threat to the stability of the state order in the Levant and Arab East. In this lecture, Steven Heydemann argues that the widespread violence now gripping the Levant and Arab East has a logic and structure that can shed light on its underlying d...

Speaker: Peter Neumann, King's College London Chair: Toby Dodge, LSE Large numbers of foreigners, including many Europeans, have joined jihadist groups in the Syrian/Iraqi conflict. Who are these people, why do they go, and what - if any - threat will they pose upon their return? Drawing on a large database with hundreds of social media profiles of Western fighters, dozens of interviews, and field...