This event was the launch of three papers authored by Courtney Freer and Spyros Sofos of the LSE Middle East Centre as part of the Global Transitions Series, a research output from PeaceRep – the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform funded by the UK Aid from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO).

1. Qatar and the UAE in Peacemaking and Peacebuilding by Courtney Freer

2. Peacebuilding in Turbulent Times: Turkey in MENA and Africa by Spyros Sofos

3. MENA Regional Organisations in Peacemaking and Peacebuilding: The League of Arab States, Gulf Cooperation Council and Organisation of Islamic Cooperation by Courtney Freer.

Courtney Freer is Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia and Visiting Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre. Previously, Courtney was Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre. From 2015-2020, Courtney was a Research Officer for the Kuwait Programme at the LSE Middle East Centre. Her work focuses on the domestic politics of the Gulf states, particularly the roles played by Islamism and tribalism. Her book Rentier Islamism: The Influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gulf Monarchies, based on her DPhil thesis at the University of Oxford and published by Oxford University Press in 2018, examines the socio-political role played by Muslim Brotherhood groups in Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. She previously worked at the Brookings Doha Center and the US–Saudi Arabian Business Council.

Spyros Sofos is a Research Officer on the LSE Kuwait Programme project 'Ecologies of Belonging and Exclusion: An Intersectional Analysis of Urban Citizenship in Kuwait City.' Spyros's research explores the intersection of societal insecurity, identity and collective action and, to date, it has focused on Turkish politics and society, nationalism and populism in Europe and the Middle East, urban citizenship in the Middle East, European Muslim identities and politics, and the theory of populism. His latest book Turkish Politics and ‘The People’: Mass Mobilisation and Populism published by Edinburgh University Press explores the emergence of populism in contemporary Turkey and its genealogy as a tradition of action and discourse. His other publications include Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe published by Routledge, Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey published by Oxford University Press, and Islam in Europe: Public Spaces and Civic Networks published by Palgrave.

Greg Shapland is a Visiting Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre and an independent researcher, writer and consultant on politics, security, resources and environment (including water) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). His entire career has been focussed on the Middle East and North Africa, whether as a commercial representative, university lecturer or government official (in the Ministry of Defence, Cabinet Office and FCO). From 1979 until 2015, he served in the MENA Research Group in the FCO. He was also Head of Research Analysts from July 2010 to July 2013. During his time with the FCO, Greg served in British Embassies in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Tel Aviv and in the Consulate General in Jerusalem. Since leaving the FCO, Greg has worked on post-conflict stabilisation, Israeli-Palestinian relations, inter-state and intra-state water disputes and the impact of climate change in the MENA region. He is currently working on a book on the politics and geography of the MENA region.

The Arabic-language news environment is facing significant challenges. Arab journalists work under multiple pressures including the lack of political freedoms, the proliferation of digital technologies and social media, the assumed disinterest of younger audiences and financial constraints facing many outlets.

As part of the research project Arab News Futures (led by Dr Omar Al-Ghazzi, LSE and Dr Abeer Al-Najjar, AUS), in this webinar, we hear from London-based Arab journalists and editors, who discuss the state of Arab news as viewed from London. They address questions such as: what are the critical issues facing Arab journalists and news media? What are the future trends in news making and consuming? How are digital technologies changing the understandings of the audience? And finally: Is London still relevant as a hub of Arabic news?

About the speakers:

Najlaa Aboumerhi is Senior Journalist, Presenter and Writer with with Alaraby TV since 2017 when she joined after 10 years of working for BBC Arabic TV. She has 18+ years experience working for different media platforms (Online, Radio and TV) and outlets in Beirut and London. She has presented news, reported, supervised, and produced political talk shows, documentaries and reported on special coverages including the Sudan Uprising, Algeria/Boutaflika resignation, Gaza War and Beirut Explosion. Recently, Najlaa has been in Ukraine covering the war from Kyiv, adding this experience to a list of events that she covered from the field, such as US Elections, Tunis, (July war in 2006, October 17, Lebanon.), Afghanistan.

Omar Al-Ghazzi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. His work focuses on questions around the global power asymmetries in the reporting and representation of conflict. He researches digital journalism, the politics of time and memory, and the geopolitics of popular culture, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa.

Ibrahim Hamidi is a Syrian journalist and Senior Diplomatic Editor at Asharq al-Awsat newspaper in London. Hamidi was the Damascus bureau of the Arab daily newspaper, Al-Hayat, for 22 years and contributes to several other international media outlets and think tanks.

Mai Noman is a media consultant and strategist. She's currently the Digital Content Editor for BBC Arabic. She for responsible for leading digital video content aimed at reaching young and female audiences. Before joining BBC Arabic, Mai worked as a Senior Journalist with the BBC’s World Service Digital Development team tasked with overseeing the digital transformation of the BBC’s 40 different language services. She assisted journalists in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, creating digital strategies and creative visual content. Prior to that, Mai was a video journalist with experience in finding innovative ways of telling complex stories.

Isam Uraiqat is co-founder and editor of the award-winning political satire magazine Alhudood. With experience working in animation, film, writing, and software development, Isam has run Alhudood as a multi-disciplinary innovative organisation, challenging how media in the region and the public interact.

This event was the launch of Leïla Vignal's latest book 'War-Torn: The Unmaking of Syria, 2011–2021' published by Hurst.

In order to consider the future of Syria, it is crucial to assess not only what has been destroyed, but also how it was destroyed. It is equally vital to address the structural and possibly enduring results of large-scale destruction and displacement. These dynamics are not only at play in Syrian society, but are tearing at the economic fabric and very territorial integrity of the country. If war is a powerful process of human and material destruction, it is equally a powerful process of spatial, social and economic reconfiguration. Nor does it stop at national borders—the unravelling of Syria, and of the idea of Syria, has affected and will continue to affect the entire Middle East.

War-Torn explores these transformations and the processes that fuel them. The book throws light on neglected aspects of the Syrian war, and contributes towards understanding conflicts in the twenty-first century.

Leïla Vignal is Professor of Geography at the École normale supérieure, Paris, and the editor of The Transnational Middle East: People, Places, Borders. Specialised in cities, globalisation and transnational dynamics in the Middle East, since 2011 she has studied the transformations of Syria and of its society through the war.

Deen Sharp is an LSE Fellow in Human Geography at the Department of Geography and Environment, LSE. He is an urban geographer whose research focuses on the political economy of urbanization in the “Middle East”. He is the co-editor of Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings (Urban Research: 2016) and Open Gaza (University in Cairo Press: In Print). He is currently working on a edited volume on the spatial dynamics of the conflict in Syria with Nasser Rabbat, provisionally entitled, Reconstruction as Violence: The case of Syria.

Michael Mason is Director of the Middle East Centre. He is also Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment and Associate of the Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. His research interests encompass environmental politics and governance, notably issues of accountability, transparency and security.

This webinar was the launch of Mariam Salehi's latest book Transitional Justice in Process: Plans and Politics in Tunisia published by Manchester University Press.

Transitional Justice in Process is the first book to comprehensively study the Tunisian transitional justice process. After the fall of the Ben Ali regime in 2011, Tunisia swiftly began dealing with its authoritarian past and initiated a comprehensive transitional justice process, with the Truth and Dignity Commission as its central institution. However, instead of bringing about peace and justice, transitional justice soon became an arena of contention.

Mariam Salehi is a researcher at the intersection of peace and conflict studies, international politics, and international political sociology. Salehi is broadly interested in (conflictive) internationalised processes of change, (transitional) justice and the production and circulation of knowledge and ideas. Salehi is currently a research group leader at Freie Universität Berlin and is involved in the SEPAD project at Lancaster University. Previously, Salehi was A.SK Postdoctoral Fellow in the Global Governance Unit at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and a Research Associate at the Center for Conflict Studies, University of Marburg. Salehi's academic work informs policy advice for federal ministries, political foundations and development agencies. As a doctoral researcher, Salehi worked in the research network 'Re-Configurations: History, Remembrance and Transformation Processes in the Middle East and North Africa' at the University of Marburg, which was funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research. Salehi's doctoral dissertation on the Tunisian transitional justice process won the 2019 dissertation award of the German Middle East Studies Association.

Charles Tripp is a Professor Emeritus of Politics with reference to the Middle East and North Africa, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His research interests include the nature of autocracy, state and resistance in the Middle East, the politics of Islamic identity and the relationship between art and power. He is currently working on a study of the emergence of the public and the rethinking of republican ideals in Tunisia. Together with other colleagues he has been one of the founders of the Centre for Comparative Political Thought at SOAS.

Iavor Rangelov is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at LSE IDEAS and Co-Founder of the Civic Ecosystems Initiative incubated at LSE. His research interests include human rights, human security, transitional justice, and civic activism, particularly in fragile and conflict-affected states. He is the author of Nationalism and the Rule of Law: Lessons from the Balkans and Beyond.

This webinar, as part of the LSE Middle East Centre's Kurdish Studies Series, was the launch of Marouf Cabi's latest book 'The Formation of Modern Kurdish Society in Iran: Modernity, Modernization and Social Change 1921-1979' published by Bloomsbury Publishing.

Although the Kurds have attracted widespread international attention, Iranian Kurdistan has been largely overlooked. This book examines the consequences of modernity and modernisation for Iran's Kurdish society in the 20th century. Marouf Cabi argues that while state-led modernisation integrated the Kurds in modern Iran, the homogenisation of identity and culture also resulted in their vigorous pursuit of their political and cultural rights.

Focusing on the dual process of state-led modernisation and homogenisation of identity and culture, Cabi examines the consequences of modernity and modernisation for the socioeconomic, cultural, and political structures as well as for gender relations. It is the consequences of this dynamic dual process that explains the modern structures of Iran's Kurdish society, on the one hand, and its intimate relationship with Iran as a historical, geographical, and political entity, on the other.

Using Persian, Kurdish and English sources, the book explores the transformation of Kurdish society between the Second World War and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, with a special focus on the era of the 'White Revolution' during the 1960s and 1970s.

Marouf Cabi is a historian focusing on Iran and its ethnic structures from World War II to present day. His most recent articles include “The Roots and the Consequences of the Iranian Revolution: A Kurdish Perspective” (2020) and “The Duality of Official and Local: Historical and Intellectual Foundations” (2021) both published in Middle East Studies. His PhD (2019) thesis explores the impact of the modernisation of Iran on twentieth-century Kurdish society. He has taught both undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Introduction to Middle Eastern History and Middle Eastern Cultural and Literary Contexts at the University of St Andrews. He also regularly presents his research in Kurdish and Iranian communities in Europe. For more on his works see https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7259-4504.

Robert Lowe is Deputy Director of the Middle East Centre and co-convenor of the Centre’s Kurdish Studies Series. His main research interest is Kurdish politics, with particular focus on the Kurdish movement in Syria. Robert was Manager and Research Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House from 2001–2010. He held a Research Fellowship from The Leverhulme Trust from 2008 to 2010 and was an Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, from 2008 to 2010.

This webinar presented the results of two LSE Kuwait Programme research projects:

1. Urban Governance and Spatial Patterns in Kuwait: Exploring the Links Between the Physical and the Socioeconomic - Dhari Alrasheed and Nuno F. da Cruz

2. Can Smart Cities Solve the Housing Crisis? A Study on Korea-Kuwait Partnership for a New Smart City in Kuwait - Hyun Bang Shin and Do Young Oh

Nuno F. da Cruz is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science. His work on urban and metropolitan governance is multidisciplinary in nature and global in reach, engaging with a wide range of public policy issues. Nuno has previously worked in cooperation with various non-government and multilateral organisations such as UCLG, Metropolis, UN Habitat and Transparency International.

Dhari Alrasheed is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the College of Business Administration at Kuwait University. His research activity spans two fields. The first is urban economics, studying various issues related to housing, spatial inequality, transportation, and social capital. The second is applied econometrics, with interest in discrete choice modeling, Bayesian econometrics, and spatial econometrics. Dhari holds a PhD and MA in economics from the University of California, Irvine, as well as a MSc and BSc in mechanical engineering from Oregon State University.

Hyun Bang Shin is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre (SEAC), and Professor of Geography and Urban Studies in the Department of Geography and Environment. Prof Shin’s research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of urbanisation with particular attention to cities in Asian countries such as Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, South Korea and China.

Do Young Oh is Research Assistant Professor at the School of Graduate Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He was previously a Research Officer, based jointly at the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre and the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he finished his PhD in Regional and Urban Planning.

Courtney Freer is a Visiting Fellow with the LSE Middle East Centre, and Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Previously, Courtney was an Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the Middle East Centre. Her work focuses on the domestic politics of the Gulf states, particularly the roles played by Islamism and tribalism. Her book Rentier Islamism: The Influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gulf Monarchies, based on her DPhil thesis at the University of Oxford and published by Oxford University Press in 2018, examines the socio-political role played by Muslim Brotherhood groups in Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

This event, with research drawn from Dr. Golnar Nikpour's book manuscript 'The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran', examined the making of the carceral state in modern Iran.

Until the turn of the 20th century, prisons were virtually nonexistent in Iran. Even by the 1920s, as the first modern prison network was being built in central Tehran, there were only a few hundred detainees being held by the centralising Pahlavi government. By the eve of the 1979 revolution, that number had ballooned to approximately 20,000 detainees. Now, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, there are at least a quarter of a million detainees being held in 268 official jails and prisons.

How and why did this extraordinary transformation and expansion occur? How did Iranians come to understand their increasingly policed and punished social worlds? What does Iran’s penal history tell us about the expansion of prisons across the world?

Golnar Nikpour is Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth University. Nikpour is a scholar of modern Iranian political and intellectual history, with a particular interest in the history of law, incarceration, and rights. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University's department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, & African Studies. She teaches on an interdisciplinary set of topics including modern Middle Eastern and North African history, Iranian history, political theory, Islamic studies, critical prison studies, and women and gender studies. From 2015-2017, Nikpour was an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and in 2017-2018, she served as Neubauer Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Since 2019, Nikpour has served on the editorial collective of the journal Radical History Review, and she also serves the editorial board of the Radical Histories of the Middle East book series on Oneworld Press. Nikpour is also co-founder and co-editor of B|ta’arof, a journal for Iranian arts and writing, where she has written extensively on the intellectual and cultural histories of Iran and its diaspora. She is currently finishing her first book project, a history of Iranian prisons and carcerality in a global context.

Nazanin Shahrokni is Assistant Professor of Gender and Globalisation and Director of MSc Programme in Gender and Gender Research at the London School of Economics. She is the author of the award-winning book, Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (University of California Press 2020) which offers a gripping inquiry into gender segregation policies and women’s rights in contemporary Iran. Nazanin serves on the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association and is on the advisory board of Middle East Law and Governance, as well, the Global Dialogue.

This event was the launch of Yaniv Voller's latest book Second-Generation Liberation Wars: Rethinking Colonialism in Iraqi Kurdistan and Southern Sudan published by Cambridge University Press.

The formation of post-colonial states in Africa, and the Middle East gave birth to prolonged separatist wars. Exploring the evolution of these separatist wars, Yaniv Voller examines the strategies that both governments and insurgents employed, how these strategies were shaped by the previous struggle against European colonialism and the practices and roles that emerged in the subsequent period, which moulded the identities, aims and strategies of post-colonial governments and separatist rebels.

Based on a wealth of primary sources, Voller focuses on two post-colonial separatist wars: in Iraqi Kurdistan, between Kurdish separatists and the government in Baghdad, and Southern Sudan, between black African insurgents and the government in Khartoum. By providing an account of both conflicts, he offers a new understanding of colonialism, decolonisation and the international politics of the post-colonial world.

Yaniv Voller is Senior Lecturer in the Politics of the Middle East at the University of Kent. Prior to this, he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Voller received his PhD from the LSE, where he also taught courses in the International Relations and the International History Departments. In 2018-2019, Yaniv was a Conflict Research Fellow at the DFID-funded Conflict Research Programme at the LSE and the Social Science Research Council. Voller's research broadly concerns the geopolitics of the Middle East, the foreign policies of Middle Eastern states, separatism/liberation, insurgency and the role of ideas, ideology and practices in shaping international politics. He is the author of The Kurdish Liberation Movement in Iraq: From Insurgency to Statehood (Routledge, 2014).

Ponsiano Bimeny is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa at LSE. He completed his PhD in Development Studies at SOAS University of London with his thesis examining the contradicting visions of the South Sudanese state and its implications for the processes of state formation within the country and in Sub Saharan Africa more broadly. Bimeny's thesis particularly focused on citizenship and identity in the context of conflict, violence and population displacement in South Sudan, drawing on the 2005 political settlement and the most recent conflict between the government's Sudan People’s Liberation Army and the different paramilitary and social groups. Bimeny has more than six years of experience working as a development professional in Northern Uganda, including delivering the UNICEF-funded Government of Uganda’s “Justice for Children” programme. Bimeny has also recently undertaken research work focusing on the post conflict settings of the Acholi and Karamoja regions of northern Uganda for the Deconstructing Notions of Resilience project at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa. He has provided regional insights about Africa’s Great Lakes Region to the Centre of African Studies at SOAS since 2016.

The Algerian Higher Education system has evolved significantly over the past six decades, responding to the changing economic and political contexts of the country.

After inheriting the French colonial education system in the sixties with minor adjustments, the seventies saw a democratisation of the space. During the eighties, the role of the single national party was affirmed with a marked Arabization of the social sciences and the establishment of several universities across the country. But from the eighties onwards, there was also a loss of autonomy and independence of the university, with increased centralisation of management by the Ministry of Higher Education, and academic leadership positions being filled by administrators. As a result, scientific research, creative innovation, and emergence of new ideas at all levels declined significantly. This loss of autonomy resulted in the migration of academics and graduates abroad. Today, the Algerian higher education system has over 1.7 million students and over 130 Higher Education Institutions, compared to 55,000 students in 1980 and 3000 in 1963, and less than 10 Higher Education Institutions in 1963.

This webinar will discuss current challenges and future opportunities across the higher education system in Algeria, with an emphasis on its historical background, evolution, and broader societal role since independence.

Mounir Khaled Berrah is a professor and author with interests in higher education, research development and innovation systems, international cooperation in science, technology and innovation, statistical information systems and digital transition. Berrah was Director of the Ecole Nationale Polytechnique in Algeria from 1997 - 2005. He was also Director General of the National Statistics Office in Algeria from 2009 - 2020.

Hayat Messekher is Professor of English at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Bouzaréah (Algiers) where she teaches pre-service teacher-trainees. She previously served as Head of the English Department. She also serves as a Consultant for British Council Algeria where she manages the portfolio of education and society programmes.

Mohamed Miliani is Professor of English at the University of Oran 2, Algeria. He specialises in education, Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), and English for Specific Purposes (ESP). He is research project lead in university ethics at the Centre for Research in Cultural and Social Anthropology (CRASC). He also serves as president of the Algerian Technical Committee for Education (UNESCO-Algeria).

Khaoula Taleb-Ibrahimi is Professor of Sciences of Languages and Director of the Linguistics, Sociolinguistics and Didactics of Languages (LISODIL) Research Laboratory at the University of Algiers II. Taleb-Ibrahimi defended and obtained her PhD on the sciences of languages at the University of Grenoble, France in 1991. She has taught linguistics, didactics, discourse analysis, language policy, textual linguistics and sociolinguistics.

Please note: this is the English language recording of this event. At times there may be pauses due to the use of an interpreter.

This event was the launch of 'Challenging Narratives of ‘Fate and Divine Will’: Access to Justice for Gender-Based Violence in Iraq' co-authored by Taif Alkhudary, Marwa Abdul Ridah, Anfal Abed and Amal Kabashi as part of the LSE Conflict Research Programme (CRP)–Iraq.

This study draws on data collected from 34 interviews to examine access to justice for gender-based violence (GBV) in the family and criminal law systems of federal Iraq. It finds that it remains near impossible for women to access effective protection, with the government of Iraq (GoI) falling short of every one of the six components identified by the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW Committee) as essential for women’s access to justice.

The paper highlights the urgent need for the GoI to work with civil society to enact the draft anti-domestic violence law. It also recommends that the GoI take broader, longer-term holistic measures, including tackling high-level and petty corruption and providing gender-sensitivity training to all law enforcement professionals, highlighting the detrimental impact of gender stereotyping on the impartiality and independence of justice systems and the rule of law.

Taif Alkhudary is an Iraq-focused Research Officer at the LSE Middle East Centre. Previously, she conducted strategic litigation on civil and political rights in Iraq and the Gulf.

Marwa Abdul Ridah is a lawyer and founder of Baghdad-based legal advocacy NGO ‘For Her’.

Anfal Abed is Projects Director of Public Aid Organisation (PAO), Iraq. Previously, she worked on gender-based violence in conflicted-affected areas in Iraq.

Amal Kabashi is a feminist activist and the coordinator of the Iraqi Women Network. She is leading the advocacy campaign to legislate an anti-domestic violence law in Iraq.