Lse Middle East Centre Podcasts

Speaker: Anastasia Nosova, LSE Chair: Courtney Freer, LSE Kuwait Programme When applied to the Gulf region in general and Kuwait more specifically, rentier state theory stipulates that the political relations between state and business are determined by rents, and therefore that business ceases to represent a strong political force and withdraws from the formal political field in exchange for wealth provided by the state. However, the evidence from Kuwait’s recent history suggests that there is great variation between the patterns of political engagement in Kuwait’s merchant families. Anastasia Nosova defines which factors explain why some merchant families engage in parliamentary politics, while others do not, and why at times the merchant community allies with the opposition, and at other times with the government. She also examines what impact this political engagement by business has on the country’s economic reform policies. Recorded on 17 January 2017. This is an LSE Kuwait Programme event.

Speaker: Aisha Al-Sarihi, LSE Kuwait Programme Discussant: Michael Mason, LSE Chair: Dr Courtney Freer, LSE Kuwait Programme The entry of the Paris Agreement into force in November 2016 coincides with the Gulf states’ acceleration of economic diversification strategies driven by the pressure to adjust fiscal deficits as a result of low oil prices. Aisha Al-Sarihi explains how economic diversification strategies create a window of opportunity for Gulf countries to progress towards the goal set in the Paris Agreement. Capturing these two challenges in a single policy could bring about ‘win-win’ outcomes that ensure both long-term benefits for climate and development. Using specific examples from Oman and the UAE, Aisha discusses the drivers of climate change action in the GCC, and potential challenges to including climate change in economic diversification strategies. Recorded on 25 April 2017. This is an LSE Kuwait Programme event.

Speaker: Michael Stephens, RUSI Chair: Courtney Freer, LSE Kuwait Programme As the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen moves into its eighth month, the country shows little sign of returning to stability. GCC operations in the country have swung the tide against the Houthi militias and their backer Ali Abdullah Saleh, however there appears little ability to connect military action to political reconciliation. The talk will focus on the ability of the GCC coalition to forge a political consensus in Yemen, on the back of a highly controversial military operation. Recorded on 17 November 2015. This is an LSE Kuwait Programme event.

Speakers: Nadje Al-Ali, SOAS; Latif Tas, SOAS Chair: John Chalcraft, LSE Horizontal organising within social movements is not necessarily sensitive to gender-based and other intersectional forms of inequalities and hierarchies. Nadje Al-Ali and Latif Tas present their paper on 'the Feminist Turn in the Kurdish Political Movement', in which they critically explore the attempts by political activists and elected representatives of the Kurdish political movement in south-eastern Turkey (northern Kurdistan) to challenge patriarchal and masculinist ideology and practices. Recorded on 7 March 2017. This seminar forms part of the Social Movements and Popular Mobilisation in the MENA Research Network.

Kuwait Programme Seminar Speaker: Lolwah Alkhater, University of Oxford Chair: Courtney Freer, LSE Kuwait Programme Since the turn of the century, many GCC states have undertaken ambitious economic and social reforms, informed by international think tanks and consultancies. Lolwah Alkhater explores the role played by consultancies and think tanks in the GCC through the lens of "policy borrowing", looking specifically at Qatar's education reforms - the most ambitious of any Middle Eastern country - which were designed and led by American think tank RAND Corporation. Recorded on Monday 13 November. Image credit: Northwestern University in Qatar, Wikimedia Commons.

Speaker: Karl Sharro aka Karl reMarks Chair: Dina Matar, SOAS The Middle East is the mysterious land of veils, minarets and Orientalist clichés. Karl Sharro, aka Karl reMarks, talks about his six year journey of satirising how his enchanted native land is represented in Western media and punditry. From the Arab Spring to the rise and decline of ISIS, Sharro discusses how his online alter ego tackled those delicate topics in tweets, blog posts, memes, animations and badly-drawn cartoons. From a more realistic James Bond movie that depicts him delivering a shipment of tear gas to a repressive regime to his 'one sentence explanation of the rise of ISIS', the talk will cover an eclectic range of subject matter. It closes with Sharro's Occidentalist work, as he returns the favour to the West in the aftermath of Brexit and Trump. Recorded on 6 November 2017. Video podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXQdzoAlPU

Speaker: Michael Willis, University of Oxford Chair: William Sinton, Society for Algerian Studies Algerian history has received a significant amount of scholarly attention but almost exclusively focused on its time under French colonial rule and especially the struggle to end this rule. Comparatively little attention has been drawn to Algeria’s independent postcolonial history despite its richness. Michael Willis looks at how, and possibly why, this is the case and discusses the controversies, challenges and rewards of researching and writing Algeria’s modern history, focusing in particular on the civil conflict of the 1990s. Recorded on 18 October 2017. Image credit: OMAR-DZ, Flickr.

Speaker: Joost Jongerden, Wageningen University Chair: Robert Lowe, LSE Middle East Centre In its 1978 manifesto, the PKK declared the establishment of an independent state to be the most important political goal of any national liberation movement. Twenty years on, the party’s leader Abdullah Öcalan changed this when he developed an ideological framework based on the idea of self-governing, stateless societies as the best way of addressing socio-economic and socio-cultural injustices. Joost Jongerden explains this paradigm shift, which reoriented the PKK as well as other Kurdish movements in the Middle East. Recorded on 12 October 2017. Image credit: Nora Miralles, Flickr.

Speaker: Toby Dodge, LSE Middle East Centre Chair: Richard Saull, QMUL In this lecture, Toby Dodge examines the Trump administration’s approach to the Middle East, specifically its policy towards Iraq, the fight against the Islamic State, and the Gulf Cooperation Council. He also looks at the ideological and organisational divisions within the White House that have exacerbated President Trump’s own very distinctive style of leadership to deliver a set of contradictory and destabilising policies in one of the world’s most unstable regions. Recorded on 11 October 2017. Image credit: Shealah Craighead / Official White House, Wikimedia Commons.

Speakers: Toby Dodge, LSE; Nussaibah Younis, Chatham House; Christine van den Toorn, IRIS In this event, Toby Dodge, Nussaibah Younis and Christine van den Toorn discuss the final report of the Task Force on the Future of Iraq. The Task Force gathered the world's leading Iraq scholars under the chairmanship of Ambassador Ryan Crocker to develop a strategy for stabilizing Iraq in the long-term, beyond the immediate liberation of Iraq's territory from ISIS. The Task Force traveled to Iraq, Europe, and the US and met with dozens of Iraqi political leaders and Western policy-makers to determine the challenges that Iraq will continue to face and to propose ways in which the international community can continue to support the country. Recorded on 27 June 2017.

Speaker: Mark Fitzpatrick, International Institute for Strategic Studies Chair: Toby Dodge, LSE Middle East Centre With a framework agreement on the future shape of Iran's nuclear programme reached after marathon talks, the world powers and Iran now aim to draft a comprehensive accord by 30 June, resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis. However, the impending deal is still under heavy attack in both Washington and Tehran. Mark Fitzpatrick assesses the political and strategic ramifications of a resolution to the crisis as well as the technical and diplomatic issues involved. Recorded on 5 May 2015. Image credit: Bundesministerium für Europa, Integration und Äusseres, Flickr. Nuclear Talks between the EU+3 and Iran.

Speaker: Thomas Pierret, University of Edinburgh Chair: John Chalcraft, LSE Over the last four years, the Syrian insurgency has witnessed the rise and consolidation of certain factions, particularly Islamist ones, but also the demise of once powerful groups of a more nationalist persuasion. Drawing on Paul Staniland's social-institutionalist conceptual framework, Thomas Pierret argues that groups that have relied on long-standing networks stemming from armed militancy or religious proselytism had a determining organisational advantage over counterparts that lacked such a background. Recorded on 2 May 2017. This seminar forms part of the 'Social Movements and Popular Mobilisation in the MENA Research Theme'.

Speakers: Danny Postel, Northwestern University; Madawi Al-Rasheed, LSE Middle East Centre; Nader Hashemi, University of Denver; Toby Matthiesen, University of Oxford; Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, University of Oxford As the Middle East descends ever deeper into violence and chaos, ‘sectarianism’ has become a catch-all explanation for the region’s troubles. The turmoil is attributed to ‘ancient sectarian differences’. In this talk, editors Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel join Madawi Al-Rasheed, Toby Matthiesen and Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi to challenge the use of ‘sectarianism’ as a magic-bullet explanation for the region’s ills, focusing on how various conflicts in the Middle East have morphed from non-sectarian (or cross-sectarian) and nonviolent movements into sectarian wars. Recorded on 8 May 2017.

Erbil-based Radio Al-Salam (https://soundcloud.com/radio-al-salam) interviewed LSE Middle East Centre Leverhulme Research Fellow Dr Filippo Dionigi about his current research project, which looks at host states' policies towards Syrian refugees. In this interview, he talks about his findings in Iraq, focusing on how the Kurdish Regional Government in particular is dealing with the presence of refugees in its territory. Radio Al-Salam is a station in the city of Erbil, serving displaced and refugee families from Iraq and Syria. Recorded on 4 May 2017.

Speaker: Rached Ghannouchi, Ennahdha Party On Thursday 20 April 2017, the MEC hosted a talk by Ennahdha (Renaissance) Party founder Sheikh Rached Ghannouchi, in which he reflected on the achievements of the 2011 Tunisian uprising, the challenges facing the region, as well as the evolution of his Party.

Speaker: Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, University of Manchester Chair: Ali Ansari, University of St Andrews Siavush Randjbar-Daemi discusses the origins and development of the presidential institution in the Islamic Republic from the 1979 Iranian Revolution to the present day. He provides an overview of both the possibilities and limitations that each president has faced whilst in power and reflects on whether the present-day Islamic Republic, now approaching its fourth decade of existence, can be defined according to the Western canons concerning state systems. Recorded on 31 January 2017.

Speakers: Nick Alton, FCO; Dania Akkad, Middle East Eye; Courtney Freer, LSE Middle East Centre; Mina Toksoz, University of Manchester and Chatham House; Representative of Oxfam UK Chair: Robert Lowe, LSE Middle East Centre BRISMES and LSE Middle East Centre jointly hosted this careers event for students interested in working in or with the Middle East. This panel discussion involves professionals from five different sectors – government, journalism, academia, business and not-for-profit. Recorded on 18 January 2017.

Speaker: Ambassador Lukman Faily, Senior Advisor to Iraqi PM Haider al-Abadi Chair: Professor Toby Dodge, LSE Middle East Centre Lukman Faily argues that the lack of social harmony in Iraqi society represents a key factor of instability and that it is necessary to identify and mediate this problem by encouraging increased cooperation between citizens though state-supported social and religious programmes. Recorded on 30 November 2016. Image credit: Copyright: Thomas Koch, Shutterstock. Najaf, Iraq.

Speakers: Yoav Peled, Tel Aviv University; Horit Herman Peled, Tel Aviv University Chair: Amnon Aran, City, University of London Yoav Peled and Horit Herman Peled examine the growing saliency of the religious outlook in Jewish Israeli society, in order to test the argument that Israeli society is undergoing a process of religionisation. They also analyse the counter-argument, that secular–religious relations among Jews in Israel went into crisis in the 1980s and that the society had actually secularised during the 1990s. They seek to explain the causes and significance of these two processes and the seeming contradiction between them, as well as the variance in the trajectory of religionisation between different historical periods. Recorded on 16 November 2016. Image credit: Damir Janaev, Flickr. Jerusalem, 2015.

Speaker: Ali Ansari, University of St Andrews Chair: Pejman Abdolmohammadi, LSE Middle East Centre The election of Hassan Rouhani to the Presidency of the Islamic Republic in 2013 for many signalled a popular rejection of the politics of confrontation endorsed by his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and support for greater liberalism at home and internationalism abroad. With his first term coming to an end and an agreement reached on Iran's nuclear programme, this talk revisits the 2013 Presidential election campaign and argues that the process retained much of the intricate management of previous elections and a willingness to 'believe the rhetoric' of the campaign has resulted in a dangerous mismanagement of expectations. Recorded on 10 November 2016. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Hassan Rouhani during the 2013 Presidential elections.