King's College London Middle East & North Africa Podcast

This book launch highlighted the economic, social and political rise of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) as well as its political resilience over the last sixteen years.

Speaker - Sevinc Bermek

Sevinc is a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies and a teaching fellow at the department of International Development at King’s College London.

She is also part-time teaching fellow at the department of Government at London School of Economics. She completed her PhD in political and social studies at the University of Warwick in 2013

Professor Laleh Khalili reflects on the lives and bodies of modern seafarers in the western Indian Ocean.

This panel examines the consequences of surrogate warfare for local conflicts in the Middle East, looking at how Iran, Arab Gulf states and the United States externalize the burden of conflicts to surrogates. What drives surrogate warfare in the region, what can patrons really achieve and what are the long-term effects trained, equipped and empowered in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere?

Speakers:

Dr. Andreas Krieg is an assistant professor at the School of Security at King’s College London currently seconded to the Royal College of Defence Studies. In his research Andreas has combined his regional expertise of the Middle East with the wider field of Security Studies. He has looked at violent non-state actors and unconventional means of warfare in the twenty-first century. As an expert for Middle East security more generally and Gulf security in particular, Andreas has employed his regional and subject-related expertise providing strategic and operational risk consultancy to a variety of commercial and governmental organizations operating in the MENA region. He most recently published a book with Georgetown University Press titled ‘Surrogate Warfare – The Transformation of War in the 21st Century’.

Anas El Gomati is the founder and current Director General of the Tripoli-based Sadeq Institute, the first public policy think tank in Libya’s history established in August 2011. Anas is also the research director for the security & governance programme at the institute. He has held several positions across the Middle East and Europe, as a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut, Lebanon and visiting lecturer at the NATO Defence College in Rome, Italy. He is a frequent commentator on Libya & the MENA region in the media. His research focuses are primarily on the security sector, foreign policy, and violent extremism

Michael Stephens is the Research Fellow for Middle East Studies and Head of RUSI Qatar. From March to June 2017 Michael was seconded into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, serving as the Senior Research Analyst for Syria and Lebanon. His research has recently focused on Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Kurdish regions of Syria, as well as UK national security policy in the Middle East.

Listen to Dr Camelia Suleiman discuss how the Arabic language became a site of struggle over legitimacy, silencing and exclusion of the Palestinian citizens of Israel who constitute roughly 20% of Israel’s population.

This is a recording of the IMES Inaugural Conference titled 'The Media, Politics and Dissent in North Africa Since the Arab Spring' which took place on 25 September 2019.

00:00 Introductions: Fatima El-Issawi and Jonathan Hill

13:30

Panel #1: The media and authoritarian resilience

Chair: Jonathan Hill

Speakers:

(1) Francesco Cavatorta;

(2) Kjetil Selvick;

(3) Hendrick Kraetzschmar.

1:23:45

Panel #2: The media and political accountability since the Arab Spring

Chair: Dina Mattar

Speakers:

(1) Roxane Farmanfarmaian;

(2) Boubaker Jamaei;

(3) Fatima el-Issawi.

2:50:50

Panel #3: New medias, new dissent?

Chair: Charis Boutieri

Speakers:

(1) Christina Moreno-Almeida;

(2) Chaima Bouhel;

(3) Omar Radi.

4:24:20

Closing address: Omar Belhouchet

A public lecture delivered by Dr Nimer Sultany (School of Law, SOAS) at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, King's College London on 30 January 2018.

What is the effect of revolutions on legal systems? What role do constitutions play in legitimating regimes? How do constitutions and revolutions converge or clash? This talk address these and other constitutional questions about the Arab Uprisings by drawing on the findings in the speaker's recently published book. The book, Law and Revolution: Legitimacy and Constitutionalism After the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2017), urges a rethinking of major categories in political, legal, and constitutional theory in light of the Arab Spring. It offers a novel and comprehensive examination of the constitutional order that preceded and followed the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Jordan, Algeria, Oman, and Bahrain. It also provides the first thorough discussion of the trials of former regime officials in Egypt and Tunisia. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, including an in-depth analysis of recent court rulings in several Arab countries, the book illustrates the contradictory roles of law and constitutions. It also contrasts the Arab Spring with other revolutionary situations and demonstrates how the Arab Spring provides a laboratory for examining scholarly ideas about revolutions, legitimacy, legality, continuity, popular sovereignty, and constituent power.

The book is a novel and comprehensive examination of the constitutional order that preceded and followed the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Jordan, Algeria, Oman and Bahrain: http://bit.ly/2AAeSf8

NIMER SULTANY is Senior Lecturer in Public Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He holds a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Harvard Law School, and was the recipient of the British Academy Fellowship. His book “Law and Revolution: Legitimacy and Constitutionalism After the Arab Spring” was published by Oxford University Press. He also published extensively on constitutional theory, Islamic constitutionalism, and Israeli jurisprudence.

"Neoliberal Development, Protests and Mobilizations Between the Urban and Rural: Reflections on the Tunisian Revolution and its Aftermath"

A public lecture delivered by Prof. Sami Zemni (Ghent University) at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, King's College London on 7 November 2017.

This presentation engages in the debate on urban contentious politics by returning to the Tunisian revolution. I reflect on how movements, provoked by neoliberal restructurings, emerged, and show how these ultimately came together to form a mass movement demanding radical political change. By analyzing the socio-spatial roots of the Tunisian revolution and by sketching the classes, social groups and movements that coalesced against authoritarian rule in early 2011, I will argue that new urban social movements have deployed new strategies of action, repertoires of contention, created new networks of solidarity and activism and how, in the end, new forms of collective mobilization and claim making are shaping the urban. However, to understand these trends I will also argue that we must re-conceptualize the urban from a relational perspective, that is, an approach that sees the urban as a relational space where movements connect and develop in relation to developments of the rural space. The interplay between urban and rural dynamics of contention seems crucial to understand the nature of unfolding events.

SAMI ZEMNI is the coordinator of the Middle East and North Africa Research Group at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University, Belgium. His area of expertise is politics within the Middle East and North Africa region, with special reference to political Islam. He focuses mainly on developments in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, democratization in the Arab World as well as conflict in the Arab world. He also writes on issues of migration, integration, racism and Islamophobia.

In this talk delivered at King's on 10 October 2017, Dr Rory McCarthy (University of Oxford) asks how competitive electoral contests have transformed an Islamist movement by looking at the internal debates and struggles that have shaped Tunisia’s al-Nahda since 2011. Drawing on a year’s fieldwork in a Nahdawi community in the provincial city of Sousse, he argues that Islamist politicization during a transition dislocates the relationship between political ambitions and the religious social movement. He identifies three specific points of tension, over ideology, political strategy, and organization, which triggered sharp differences among al-Nahda activists.

DR RORY MCCARTHY is a Fellow by Examination (Junior Research Fellow) in Oriental Studies at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he works on social movements, contentious politics, and Islamism in the Middle East and North Africa. He wrote his doctorate on the evolution of the Islamist movement Ennahda in one Tunisian city, and is now working on a new long-term project on the politics of protest in the Middle East after the Arab uprisings. He also wrote Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated: Stories from the New Iraq (Chatto & Windus, 2006) and co-edited Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring: Triumphs and Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2016). Previously, he spent a decade as a foreign correspondent with the Guardian, with postings in Islamabad, Baghdad, Beirut, and Jerusalem.

Activists discuss how the pervasive issue of gender inequality manifests itself in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This podcast was recorded in connection with a joint event organised by the British Council and the King's College London Department of Middle Eastern Studies on 7 March 2017, and is chaired by Gillian Cowell, Head of Gender and Inclusion at the British Council. It features Hajer Sharief (Co-founder, Together We Build It), Sussan Tahmasebi (Director of the MENA/Asia region program, ICAN) and Reem Wael (Gender Consultant)

A public lecture delivered by Dr Adeel Malik (University of Oxford) at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, King's College London.

This lecture seeks to develop a broader political economy narrative on violence in the Middle East. Using the recent ISIS-related violence in the Levant as a hook, I probe the deep political and economic factors underpinning violence in the region. Recent violence does not easily lend itself to empirical evidence. Beyond popular representations in the media, the social scientist has little knowledge of real actors on the ground, their control over means of violence and access to the supply chain of war. In light of this, I make four key propositions and situate them in the political economy analysis of violence. First, violence is not just a random or spontaneous generation: it is linked with the rational logic of power and formal state structures. Second, violence directly emerges from a power vacuum generated by ill-advised foreign interventions. Third, violence is often only a temporary instrument that seeks to postpone emerging challenges to the prevailing power structure. Fourth, the ISIS-related conflict also constitutes a trade shock and a fundamental re-drawing of the economic boundaries of the Middle East. The paper concludes by developing futuristic perspectives on imagining a peaceful and prosperous social order in the Middle East.

ADEEL MALIK is Globe Fellow in the Economies of Muslim Societies at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and a University Research Lecturer in Development Economics at the University of Oxford. He is also a Research Fellow of St. Peter’s College, Oxford, and a Research Associate of the Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource-Rich Economies. Having completed his doctorate in economics from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar in 2004, his previous research affiliations have included: the Department of Economics, Oxford University (2004-05); Merton College (2002-03 and 2005-06); Center for International Development, Harvard University (2001), and Mahbub ul Haq Human Development Centre, Islamabad (1997-1999). Malik is an empirical macroeconomist with a strong multi-disciplinary orientation. He is trying to develop a broader research lens on the political economy of the Middle East. His most recent contribution to the field was an article on “The Economics of the Arab Spring”, which was published in World Development and formed the basis for a dedicated story in the Economist magazine. Malik’s research on Middle Eastern political economy has featured in the CNN, Fortune Magazine, The Times London, Financial Times, Guardian and Gulf News. He has also engaged with a wider audience on this subject by contributing op-ed pieces to The New York Times, Project Syndicate, Al-Jazeera, Huffington Post, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs Magazines.