Madawi al-Rasheed (LSE) and Courtney Freer (LSE), give a talk for the Middle East Centre Seminar Series at St Anthony's College Oxford, chaired by Toby Matthiesen (St Anthony's College). Dr Courtney Freer is a Research Officer at the Kuwait Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her work focuses on the domestic politics of the Arab Gulf states, with a particular focus on Islamism and tribalism. Her DPhil thesis at the University of Oxford revised rentier state theory by examining the socio-political role played by Muslim Brotherhood groups in Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE; a book version of these findings will be published by Oxford University Press in Spring 2018 under the title Rentier Islamism: The Influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gulf Monarchies. She previously worked as a Research Assistant at the Brookings Doha Center and as a researcher at the US-Saudi Arabian Business Council.

Professor Madawi Al-Rasheed is Visiting Professor at the Middle East Centre, London School of Economics. Previously she was Professor of Social Anthropology at King’s College, London and Visiting Research professor at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on history, society, religion and politics in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Middle Eastern Christian minorities in Britain, Arab migration, Islamist movements, state and gender relations, and Islamic modernism. Her latest book Muted Modernists: the Struggle over Divine Politics in Saudi Arabia was published by Hurst in 2015. Her presentation draws on her forthcoming edited volume: Salman’s Legacy: the dilemmas of a new era published by Hurst and OUP in March 2018.