Ambassador Wilks CMG (HM British Ambassador to Iraq), gives a talk for the Middle East Centre seminar series.  Jon Wilks has just finished a two year posting as UK Ambassador to Iraq, his third posting to Iraq since he reopened the Embassy in Baghdad in 2003. He has served 30 years in the UK diplomatic service with a Middle East focus, including Ambassadorial postings to Yemen (10-11) and Oman (14-17). He was also UK Syria Envoy 2012-2014. He is a fluent Arabist and was the first UK Arabic Spokesperson based in the region 2007-2009. He will be taking up a new Ambassadorial appointment in the region next year.

His deep interest in Middle East Politics and International Relations led him to take a sabbatical to complete an MA in Middle East Politics at Durham University (99/00) and an MPhil in International Relations at St Antony’s (00/02). He is a previous speaker at the Middle East Centre having shared his reflections with us on his posting to Yemen in 2011 and his Syria responsibilities in 2014.

Iraq and Iran: old foes, ambivalent allies

The Middle East Centre, founded in 1957 at St Antony’s College is the centre for the interdisciplinary study of the modern Middle East in the University of Oxford.  Centre Fellows teach and conduct research in the humanities and social sciences with direct reference to the Arab world, Iran, Israel and Turkey, with particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, during our regular Friday seminar series, attracting a wide audience, our distinguished speakers bring topics to light that touch on contemporary issues.

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MEC Women's Rights Research Seminar delivered by Dr Heba El-Shazli (George Mason University) Chaired by Dr Maryam Alemzadeh (St Antony's College) The seminar was delivered on Tuesday 7th May

Reflections on Tunisian Women's Continued Fight for Respect, Dignity and Rights: Focus on Women in the Labour Movement

This talk delves into the multifaceted challenges Palestinian women activists face, revealing how intersecting oppressions within a settler-colonized society shape their organizing efforts and experiences, challenging singular analyses of patriarchy. How can we understand the multiple, intersecting webs of oppression that Palestinian women activists face in their everyday organizing? The talk is going to illuminates the context and complexity of the lived experiences of women activists in Palestine, aiming to contribute to feminist perspectives on organizing and how activists’ daily practices and interactions ‘inhabit’ institutions, creating, maintaining and transforming them. The analysis exposes a ‘simultaneity of oppressions’ which highlights the challenges faced by Palestinian women attempting to organize to challenge the social structure, within their quasi-state, settler-colonized context. The talk aims to uncover multiple intersecting inequalities produced by dominant institutional and societal structures, yet experienced differently by women activists, in an oppressed, colonized setting. This distinctive political context, aligned with the collaborative security setting with the occupier, elucidates how violations of the quasi-state, colonizer and other social structures like patriarchy and family manifest and intersect institutionally to violate and undermine women. Dr. Nazzal challenges the singular monolithic analysis of patriarchy, revealing how different patriarchal positions towards women expose different modes of oppression, while serving at times as a protective, supportive system.

Webs of oppression’ in everyday organizing in Palestine: An Intersectional Feminist Analysis

This lecture explores how parliamentary activity affects the candidacy list placements of MPs in closed-list PR systems, particularly focusing on the interaction between gender and candidacy list decisions. While it is generally argued that the parliamentary activities of the MPs will increase their chances for re-election, this link is not straightforward in closed-list PR systems, where the party leaderships dominate the candidate selection processes. The determinants of the centralized candidate selection processes are highly ambiguous, making it hard to understand how accountability works for MPs in such settings. Furthermore, existing research pays little attention to how politicians' gender interacts with these processes. This article aims to answer these questions by analyzing the determinants of candidacy list placements using a novel dataset containing over 200,000 parliamentary speeches in Turkey. We present evidence that (1) parliamentary activity has a statistically significant positive effect on the candidacy list placement decisions of the party elites, and yet, (2) this effect is conditional upon politicians' gender. We found that speech is associated with higher candidacy list placements in the next election for women politicians while no such effect exists for men. We suggest that this heterogeneity is driven by intra-party competition and the perception that women MPs would be less threatening for existing party leadership positions compared to men MPs.
Dr Tugba Bozcaga joined EIS as a lecturer in politics with a specialisation in political methodology. She earned a PhD in political science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2020. Before coming to King's, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard University. She is also a faculty fellow at the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS). Her research focuses on political economy of development, with a substantive focus on local governance, bureaucracy and state capacity, distributive politics, social welfare, and migration. Her work has been awarded Mancur Olson Best Dissertation Prize in Political Economy (Honorable Mention) from American Political Science Association (APSA). She also received the Best Comparative Policy Paper Award from APSA Public Policy Section, APSA MENA Politics Section Best Paper Award, and APSA Religion and Politics Section Best Paper Award.

The Gender Effect in Intra-Party Meritocracy (with Rabia Kutlu)

In this podcast, Oxford Emeritus Professor Avi Shlaim compares notes with Exeter University Professor Ilan Pappé on the prospects for a binational state in the aftermath of the events of 7 October and the Gaza War.

Is a Binational State Possible After 7 October?

A discussion of European initiatives to recognize the State of Palestine to advance the prospects for a two-state solution. In this episode, former Israeli Ambassador and Director General of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Alon Liel speaks with Haizam Amirah-Fernández, Senior Analyst for Mediterranean and Middle Eastern affairs at the Elcano Institute in Madrid, and Chris Doyle, Director of CAABU, the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, to consider European initiatives to recognize the State of Palestine to advance the prospects for a two-state solution.

The Middle East Centre convenes its Hilary Term 2024 seminar each Monday night in term around the theme of 'Political Options Following the Gaza War.'  The aim is to bring primarily Palestinian and Israeli speakers each week to discuss the different options facing policy makers in the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 attacks in Israel and the 2023-2024 War in Gaza.  While some in the Israeli government call for continued security control over all Palestinian territories, many in the international community believe Palestinian statehood and the end of occupation the only sustainable course of action.  In one session, speakers from Britain, Spain, and Israel will consider European proposals for recognizing Palestinian statehood.  However, Palestinian independence is not the only option.  Others continue to argue that a binational state, in which Palestinians and Israelis would enjoy citizenship, is the most feasible option, given the fragmentation of the West Bank by Israeli settlements.  Yet all recognize that the political environment for substantive change has become far more difficult as a result of the 7 October attack and the Gaza War.

Iraq and Iran: old foes, ambivalent allies

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