LSE Middle East Centre Podcasts

Writer and art critic, Rahel Aima, who grew up and currently lives in Dubai, talks to us about living in the Gulf, a region rapidly developing itself as the place to be for smart cities and high-tech living. Rahel explores a concept she has been thinking about for some time, the Khaleeji Ideology, which meets at the intersection of technology, economy, the environment and nation building, as a way...

This event, co-organised with LSE IDEAS, was the launch of the special issue ‘Arab Constitutional Responses to the Revolutions and Transformations in the Region’ published in the Journal of Constitutional Law in the Middle East and North Africa. The special issue is the result of a two year collaboration between the Carnegie Corporation, the Arab Association of Constitutional Law, and LSE. In the...

Nearly ten years since the onset of the crisis in Yemen this discussion provided an in-depth assessment of the conflict over the past decade. Panellists examined the local origins of the war, the humanitarian catastrophe that has ensued, and the challenges for sustainable development given the prolonged violence. Regional dynamics fueling the crisis were also analysed, including factors related to...

How can art complicate claims of progress, innovation and the use of rapidly developing emerging technologies in MENA? In this episode, Cima Chehab speaks to visual artist Nadim Choufi about how he incorporates technology into his artwork both as subject matter and as medium. In the conversation, they discuss Nadim’s own artistic practice, his use of “lecture performances” and the question of whet...

Majd Al-Shihabi of 'Palestine Open Maps' and Sana Yazigi of the 'Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution' talk to us about how they have centered their archiving processes around maps, and what digital archiving can do for Palestinian and Syrian community-building. This episode also features comment from Dr Sara Salem and Dr Mai Taha of LSE, who explore the importance of creative archiving throug...

This event was the launch Zoe Hurley's new book 'Social Media Influencing in the City of Likes: Dubai and the Postdigital Condition'. Evaluating the cases of multiple influencers, from local to transnational content creators, Hurley reveals how residents, non-citizens and migrant workers survive as influencers in the city of ‘likes.’ Providing de-Westernising perspectives of Dubai’s social media i...

This event was co-organised by the LSE Middle East Centre and the LSE Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa. This panel explored the crisis in Sudan through the prism of ‘disconnection’, exploring the various disconnects and discordances that have formed between Sudanese popular groups, state institutions and international institutions. Stopping the violence and addressing Sudan’s trauma will ultimatel...

Iraq’s engagement with fintech is new but rapidly developing, amidst a contemporary economic history that has struggled with foreign intervention and internal corruption, while Iranians have been engaging with a form of fintech - alternative digital currencies - for some time, to evade and work around sanctions and a crippled economy. In this episode we speak to Ali Al-Hilli and Shayan Eskandari,...

This event was the launch Eylaf Bader Eddin's new book 'Translating the Language of the Syrian Revolution' published by De Gruyter Press. For activists, researchers, and journalists, the Syrian Revolution was primarily a revolution in language; a break with the linguistic oppression and rigidity of old regimes. This break was accompanied by the emergence of new languages, which made it possible to...

What kind of advancements have we seen in artificial intelligence in the Middle East and North Africa in the contemporary period, how has this technology been used for good and where has it maintained structures of inequality? In this talk by Nagla Rizk, Professor of Economics at the American University in Cairo, the potential opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence were explored,...

Smartphones, food-only debit cards, biometric data checks at border crossings, these are some of the ways refugees and migrants interact with technology in their daily lives both in the region and the diaspora. This episode unpacks the benefits, ambivalences and concerns surrounding these technologies. Our guests, Dr Reem Talhouk and Dr Yener Bayramoğlu discuss refugee-centered design technologies...

The Abbasid and British Empires are the nexus through which our two guests, Dr Ahmed Ragab and Dr Katayoun Shafiee explore technology, knowledge production and power. This episode charts medieval paper production and Abbasid-era hospitals to the "discovery" of oil by foreign entrepreneurs in southern Iran, exploring the different ways technological knowledge production developed across empire. Ahm...

What kinds of obstacles are people in MENA facing with regards to access to technological opportunity and concerns around digital rights abuses? How are they tied to global challenges? Dr Nakeema Stefflbauer, tech executive, investor and digital rights advocate shares her thinking. This episode also features comment from Kassem Mnejja and Marwa Fatafta of Access Now, a digital rights advocacy grou...

This event, as part of the LSE Middle East Centre's Kurdish Studies Series, was the launch of 'Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey' by Marlene Schäfers, published by the University of Chicago Press. In Turkey, recent decades have seen Kurdish voices gain increasing moral and political value as metaphors of representation and resistance. Women’s...

This event launched 'Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region' edited by Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell, published by Pluto Press. The Arab region is a focus of world politics, with authoritarian regimes, significant fossil fuel reserves and histories of colonialism and imperialism. It is also the site of potentially immense green energy resources. The writ...

This event was the launch of 'Broken Bonds: The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013–22' by Abdelrahman Ayyash, Amr ElAfifi, and Noha Ezzat published by Century International. In this original Century International book, the authors argue that the Brotherhood is experiencing multiple crises—of identity, legitimacy, and membership—which accelerated after Egypt’s military coup in J...

This panel was an opportunity for students to hear about different pathways into Middle East related fields. Meet the speakers: Marwa Baabbad is Director of the Yemen Policy Centre. She is a researcher and development consultant with over ten years of experience working in the fields of community engagement, gender, peace and security, and youth political inclusion. Marwa was Director of the Oxfor...

This event was the launch of the paper 'A New Diaspora of Saudi Exiles: Challenging Repression from Abroad' by Professor Madawi Al-Rasheed published under the LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series. Since the rise of Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman in 2017, a new wave of exodus began, that has pushed feminists, young students, secularists, Islamists and others to flee the country in search of...

This event was the launch of the paper 'Art and Activism in Iraqi Kurdistan: Feminist Fault Lines, Body Politics and the Struggle for Space' by Dr Isabel Käser and Houzan Mahmoud. This paper is the outcome of a project run under the LSE Middle East Centre's Academic Collaboration with Arab Universities Programme. Meet the speakers: Isabel Käser is a Visiting Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre an...

This event was a discussion around Dr Nora Derbal's latest book 'Charity in Saudi Arabia: Civil Society under Authoritarianism' published by Cambridge University Press. In this study of everyday charity practices in Jeddah, Nora Derbal employs a 'bottom-up' approach to challenge dominant narratives about state-society relations in Saudi Arabia. Exploring charity organizations in Jeddah, this book...

This event was the launch of Jamie Allinson's latest book The Age of Counter-Revolution: States and Revolutions in the Middle East published by Cambridge University Press. The 'Arab Spring' has come to symbolise defeated hopes for democracy and social justice in the Middle East. In this book, Allinson demonstrates how these defeats were far from inevitable. Rather than conceptualising the 'Arab Sp...

In order to survive in a hostile environment in the Middle East, Israeli decision makers developed a regional foreign policy designed to find ways to approach states, leaders and minorities willing to cooperate with it against mutual regional challenges. Examples include the Periphery Alliance with Iran and Turkey until 1979, cooperation with the Kurds, the Maronites in Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, S...

Professor Martin van Bruinessen delivered a keynote lecture on the history and development of Kurdish Studies as part of a series of activities surrounding the LSE Middle East Centre's inaugural Kurdish Studies Conference on 24-25 April, 2023. The first attempts at institutionalising Kurdish Studies in European academia emerged as a result of the First World War and the British and French mandates...

Life in Abu Dhabi is centred around cars. Its urban development and open space infrastructure has impacted the walkability of the city, increasing residents' reliance on cars for mobility. This pattern of development is embedded in a social and spatial practice of not only urban life, but also urban governance and planning. This seminar explores some of the dimensions that have impacted and are em...

This event opened the exhibition 'Ruptured Domesticity: Mapping Spaces of Refuge in Iraq' by Dr Sana Murrani, hosted at LSE until 12 May 2023. Using photographs, illustrative maps and drawings, Murrani examines the domestic and intimate spaces of refuge created by Iraqis in preparation for, and in response to, wartime and violence. This work is funded by the British Institute for the Study of Iraq...