LSE Middle East Centre Podcasts

This event is a launch for Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Sam Dagher's latest book Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family's Lust for Power Destroyed Syria. In spring 2011, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad turned to his friend and army commander, Manaf Tlass, for advice about how to respond to Arab Spring-inspired protests. Tlass pushed for conciliation but Assad decided to crush the upr...

This event is the launch of the report titled ‘Public Payroll Expansion in Iraq: Causes and Consequences’ published under the LSE Conflict Research Programme by Principal Investigator Ali Al-Mawlawi. The public payroll in Iraq has grown unchecked since 2003, commensurate with the country’s vastly expanding oil wealth. With few alternative sources of government income, the state budget’s growth pos...

This event launches the paper “Yazidis and ISIS: The Causes and Consequences of Sexual Violence in Conflict” published under the LSE Conflict Research Programme by Principal Investigator Dr. Zeynep Kaya. It has been five years since ISIS brought the Yazidi community in Iraq to the brink of destruction. Some women and children held by ISIS have been re-captured by criminal gangs to be trafficked or...

This event launches the book Methodological Approaches in Kurdish Studies: Theoretical and Practical Insights from the Field. It is a volume that presents thirteen contributions that reflect upon the practical, ethical, theoretical and methodological challenges that researchers face when conducting fieldwork in settings that are characterized with deteriorating security situations, increasing stat...

Please note that this event involved a translator, as a result there may be some background noise in parts of the recording where translation is taking place. This event will analyse current developments on the ground in Northern Syria with Ilham Ehmed, co-president of the Executive Council of the de-facto autonomous region of North and East Syria. Following the recent Turkish incursion and US wit...

This event is a book launch for Eric Rouleau's autobiographical work titled Truths and Lies in the Middle East: Memoirs of a Veteran Journalist, 1952-2012. Eric Rouleau was one of the most celebrated journalists of his generation, a status he owed to his extraordinary career, which began when Hubert Beuve-Méry, director of Le Monde, charged him with covering the Near and Middle East. Alain Gresh,...

With continuous protests ongoing across Lebanon for the last two weeks, this event will analyse this largest demonstration of public disobedience for the past decade. The situation will be contextualised against the backdrop of failing state services, a system that has gradually drifted apart from society, and also a society that has reached its consumerist limits. This event is part of a series b...

This event launched the paper “Response to and Reparations for Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Iraq: The Case of Shi’a Turkmen Survivors in Tel Afar” published under the LSE Conflict Research Programme by Principal Investigator Güley Bor. During the most recent Islamic State conflict, thousands of Yazidi, and hundreds of Shi’a Turkmen and Christian women were kidnapped and subjected to various...

This is a recording of the Q&A section of LSE MEC's event screening Benedetta Argentieri's documentary I am the Revolution which focuses on feminist revolutions taking place in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. These countries has been torn apart by decades of war, and are, according to international indexes, among the worst places on earth to live as a woman. By following three women, Selay Ghaffar,...

This event launches The Kurds of Northern Syria: Governance, Diversity and Conflicts, written by Harriet Allsopp and Wladimir van Wilgenburg and published by Bloomsbury in July 2019. Based on unprecedented access to Kurdish-governed areas of Syria, including exclusive interviews with administration officials and civilian surveys, The Kurds of Northern Syria sheds light on the socio-political lands...

The Iraqi media landscape has been characterised by partisan ownership, in the main based on political and religious affiliations. Comparative ethnographic research has revealed highly irregular practices and the struggles of Iraqi journalists to adhere to the norms of professionalism, suggesting that these practices are contributing to and fuelling the on-going context of conflict and violence in...

Women have been at the forefront of many of the political and military struggles in the Kurdish Middle East, most visibly so since the outbreak of the ‘Rojava Revolution’ in 2012. But women have in fact since the foundation of the PKK in 1978 played an integral role in the ideological and political development of the Liberation Movement as a whole; as guerrillas, activists, politicians, mothers an...

Since free elections were introduced in Turkey, no other party has been able to retain its incumbency as much as the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Given incumbents’ tendency to lose support over time, what are the factors which explain the electoral durability of the party? In this event, Dr Luca will explore the rising consolidation of power by the AKP through the lens of distributive poli...

There has been much discussion whether the 1953 should be understood in the context of the Cold War or that of economic conflicts between the industrial West and developing countires--in other words, as precursor of the rise of OPEC and oil nationalisation by emerging states in the 1960s and 1970s. In this talk, Professor Abrahamian will focus on how far the newly released State Department and CIA...

Since February 2019 and President Bouteflika’s announcement that he intended to stand for a fifth term, hundreds of thousands of protesters have descended upon Algeria’s streets to demand his resignation. In the face of pressure from the street and the army, Bouteflika, who suffered a debilitating stroke in 2013, finally stepped down after 20 years in power on 2 April. Hugh Roberts, expert in Alge...

Stuart Hall once wrote that we mustn’t use Gramsci like ‘an Old Testament prophet who, at the correct moment, will offer us the consoling and appropriate quotation.’ Instead, we must ‘think’ our problems in a Gramscian way. What would it mean to ‘think’ some of the problems facing Egypt and the broader Middle East in such a way, and what are some of the challenges and productive encounters this mi...

This report assesses widespread claims that pan-Arab satellite news channels have been responsible for inciting sectarian violence during the Arab uprisings. Based on an empirical study of how three of the most popular channels – Al-Jazeera Arabic, Al-Arabiya and Al-Mayadeen - have framed seminal events involving violence between sects in Syria and Iraq, the report finds that while often geo-polit...

BRISMES and LSE Middle East Centre are delighted to host this panel event on Middle East Careers where speakers will talk briefly about their current role and career path and give advice to students. There will be plenty of opportunity for questions. Followed by networking reception. Recorded on 7 March 2019. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------...

One of the most prominent sticking points in Israeli–Palestinian negotiations is the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Yoav Kapshuk investigates how the concept of ‘transitional justice’, often used in post-conflict political bargaining, could be utilised in future peace talks to reach a settlement. In addition to analysing previous rounds of negotiations that sought to resolve the refugee...

Apologies for the abrupt start of the podcast. The first two minutes of the recording were corrupted. A panel of academics and activists will make critical interventions on sexualities and approaches to LGBT activism in and across the MENA. Specifically, by foregrounding voices from the region and its diaspora, this lecture pushes to challenge debates and discussions that sometimes look in on the...

The national armed forces of Arab states have been undergoing a radical transformation. New fluid coalitions of armed state and non-state actors engage in complex patterns of coexistence and contestation, set within a wider context of geopolitical rivalry between their external backers. Renowned Middle East scholar Yezid Sayigh examines the re-emergence of militaries as central political actors. R...

On 19 July 2018, the Israeli parliament passed the controversial Basic Law, which defines the nature of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. This talk analyses the different clauses of the law, reflects on their meaning with the help of the discussions that took place in the Knesset during the legislation period, and ties them with broader political and social processes ta...

In recent years Israel has forged closer links with Arab Gulf states with which it has no diplomatic relations, unlike Egypt and Jordan. The main factors in their converging interests are shared alarm about Iran’s rise as a regional power, opposition to Barack Obama’s Middle East policies and the marginalization of the divided Palestinians. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain all have business, secu...

Speaker: Jim Muir, BBC News and LSE Middle East Centre Visiting Senior Fellow Chair: Ian Black, LSE Middle East Centre Visiting Senior Fellow Jim Muir has lived in and reported on the Middle East since he arrived in Beirut in January 1975, armed with a Cambridge degree in Arabic. Expecting Lebanon to be a stable base from which to cover a turbulent region, he spent the next 15 years reporting on t...

Speaker: Mehmet Kurt, LSE and Yale University Chair: Robert Lowe, LSE Middle East Deputy Director Islam has returned to the Turkish and Kurdish public and political spheres, becoming an effective means to mobilise voters and recruit supporters during the AKP era. In this talk, Mehmet Kurt highlights two distinctive approaches to the Kurdish issue adopted by Kurdish Hizbullah (Huda-Par) and the wid...