Lse Middle East Centre Podcasts

Speaker: Toby Dodge, LSE Middle East Centre Chair: Zeynep Kaya, LSE Middle East Centre Toby Dodge, MEC Director and Kuwait Professor, considers the reasons behind the rise of the Islamic State and its expansion, looking at the implications of intervention by both international and regional powers on Iraq. Recorded on 27 January 2016.

Speaker: Nicola Pratt, University of Warwick Chair: Aitemad Muhanna-Matar, LSE Oral history remains a largely untapped source in research on the Arab world. Simultaneously, women’s activism in the post-independence period remains relatively understudied, despite a heightened interest in women’s involvement in the Arab uprisings. Based on personal narratives of women activists of different generations in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, this lecture explores the history of women’s activism in the Arab world from the 1950s onwards. Recorded on 20 January 2016. Image credit: An Egyptian woman tries to stop a military bulldozer in Cairo. Globovisión, Flickr.

Speaker: Madawi Al-Rasheed, LSE Middle East Centre Chair: Toby Dodge, LSE Middle East Centre Analysis of both official and opposition Saudi divine politics is often monolithic, conjuring images of conservatism, radicalism, misogyny and resistance to democracy. In this event, Madawi Al-Rasheed launches her new book in which she challenges this stereotype by examining a long tradition of engaging with modernism that gathered momentum with the Arab uprisings and incurred the wrath of both the Saudi regime and its Wahhabi supporters. She also challenges much of the scholarly received wisdom on Islamism in general, blurring the boundaries between secular and religious politics. Recorded on 14 January 2016.

Speaker: Dina Esfandiary, King's College London Chair: Roham Alvandi, LSE With the July 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, attention has shifted to regional security. The rise of ISIS and the instability left behind by the Arab Spring has cemented dysfunction and chaos in the Middle East. Tackling it will require Iran’s help, or at the very least, its input. Dina Esfandiary discusses who makes foreign policy decisions in Iran, Iran’s regional policy and explore the impact of the nuclear agreement on its efforts in Iraq and Syria in particular. She also explores the potential for meaningful dialogue on regional security issues between Iran and the Arab Gulf countries. Recorded on 9 December 2015.

Speaker: Abdulhadi Khalaf, Lund University Chair: John Chalcraft, LSE In this seminar, Abdulhadi Khalaf revisits the Bahraini trajectory of the Arab Spring. He examines the consequences of competition between moderate opposition networks and their diverse radical flanks. The paper argues that the positive roles of the radical flanks include developing new political opportunities and attracting new participants to join the movement. These, in the case of Bahrain, have outweighed the commonly cited negative outcomes, such fragmenting the movement and/or exposing it to manipulation by one or more of the protagonists in the ongoing contention. Recorded on 8 December 2015. This event forms part of the Social Movements and Popular Mobilisation in the MENA event series. Image Credit: Flickr, Chris Price. Flag of Bahrain.

Speaker: Pejman Abdolmohammadi, LSE Middle East Centre Chair: Roham Alvandi, LSE In the last three years, the main focus of the international community and the media dealing with Iran has been the nuclear issue and Iranian foreign policy. Despite the relevance of these two elements, Pejman Abdolmohammadi argues that there is another paramount aspect which, in the next two decades, could have a crucial influence over the future of Iran. This new aspect is related to Iranian civil society and its ongoing radical change and is defined by Abdolmohammadi as the “Iranian Renaissance”. Recorded on 1 December 2015. Image Credit: Andrew Partain, Flickr. Iran's 2009 Green Revolution.

Speaker: Daniel Neep, Georgetown University Chair: Toby Dodge, LSE Middle East Centre Why did Syria transition from a laissez-faire to a statist economy between 1946 and 1954? Existing scholarship proposes a political or class-based explanation: the anti-colonial old bourgeoisie that inherited power after independence was so discredited by its record of economic mismanagement, cronyism, and defeat in the 1948 war that army officers felt obliged to intervene. Daniel Neep presents his paper explaining the shift by using a constructivist historical institutionalist approach to emphasise the importance of ideas in producing economic shifts. Recorded on 29 October 2015.

Speaker: Toby Matthiesen, University of Oxford Chair: Toby Dodge, LSE Middle East Centre Toby Matthiesen launches his new book titled The Other Saudis: Shiism, dissent and sectarianism in which he traces the politics of the Shia in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia from the nineteenth century until the present day. The book outlines the difficult experiences of being Shia in a Wahhabi state, and casts new light on how the Shia have mobilised politically to change their position. The book is based on little-known Arabic sources, extensive fieldwork in Saudi Arabia and interviews with key activists. Of immense geopolitical importance, the oil-rich Eastern Province is a crucial but little known factor in regional politics and Gulf security. Recorded on 28 October 2015.

Speaker: Ed McAllister, University of Oxford Chair: John King, Society for Algerian Studies From the perspective of a working-class Algiers neighbourhood, this talk looks at social memories of post-independence nation-building during the 1970s as reflections of the disappointments of the 1980s, the dislocation caused by civil war during the 1990s, and the reinforced state power and consumerism of the 2000s. In contrast to the scholarly attention commonly devoted to periods of violence and upheaval in Algerian history, McAllister sets out to explore how Algerians remember a much understudied decade of stability, and to ask what these memories reveal about current relationships to politics and society, by focusing on views of politics, urban space and sociability at neighbourhood level. Recorded on 21 October 2015. This event is jointly organised by the LSE Middle East Centre and the Society for Algerian Studies. Image credit: texturedutemps.org. Algiers in the 1970s.

Speaker: Sami Zemni, Middle East and North Africa Research Group Chair: John Chalcraft, LSE In this seminar, Sami Zemni presents his paper, co-written with Habib Ayeb, titled: Between Hegemony and Resistance: towards a moral economy of the Tunisian Revolution. The revolutionary upheavals in Tunisia and across the MENA which began in 2011 have fundamentally challenged the frameworks traditionally used to define and interpret Arab political life, namely ‘authoritarian resilience’ and/or ‘democratization studies’. The paper uses a ‘moral economy’ approach in order to understand the massive mobilizations that led to Ben Ali’s disappearance, and to make sense of the nature of political change in the post-Ben Ali era. Recorded on 20 October 2015. This event forms part of the Social Movements and Popular Mobilisation in the MENA event series.

Speakers: Fran Tonkiss, LSE; Dr Mona Khechen, AUB Chair: Romola Sanyal, LSE This event represents the culmination of a collaborative research project between LSE and the American University of Beirut. The event addresses current processes of urban development in Beirut, focusing on the Ras Beirut neighbourhood. In contrast to the well-established literature on gentrification in North American and European cities, and increasing focus on development logics in cities in emerging and transitional economies, there is comparatively little academic research on urban restructuring in cities in the Middle East. Speakers explore the remaking of Ras Beirut from the standpoint of comparative urbanism – highlighting the specificities of this case, placing it in the context of regional and international capital flows and real estate development, and analysing the relevance of established frameworks in critical urban studies and political economy to such a setting. Recorded on 1 October 2015.

Speakers: Martha Mundy, LSE; Rami Zurayk, American University of Beirut (AUB); Cynthia Gharios, AUB Chair: Michael Mason, LSE This event is the culmination of field research carried out over four years in collaboration with the American University of Beirut. Speaking to the work of the project ‘The Palimpsest of Agrarian Change’, Martha Mundy and Rami Zurayk and their colleagues Saker El-Nour and Cynthia Gharios present their findings on agrarian change in Lebanon. Food insecurity and ‘land grabs’ are as much a part of the Middle Eastern landscape as they are for neighbouring regions such as Africa. The historical layers that lie behind the conflicts over the capacity to produce food and access the land remain, however, remarkably poorly documented. This project documents shifts in the forms of food production and the political ecology of urbanisation that can be traced back to the legacies of Ottoman and French Mandate rule and, more recently, war and labour migration. The result is both a critique (and

Speaker: Stéphane Lacroix, Sciences Po Chair: Toby Dodge, LSE On 3 July 2013, Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s guidance bureau and the first democratically elected president of Egypt, was overthrown by a military coup led by General Abdelfattah al-Sisi. Since then, the Muslim Brotherhood has been designated a terrorist organization and brutally repressed. In contrast, the Salafi al-Nour party, the political arm of the "Salafi Call" (al-da'wa al-salafiyya), has supported Morsi’s overthrow, taken part in the writing of a new constitution and supported General Sisi in the May 2014 presidential elections. How can we account for al-Nour’s political strategy? What role does the party play in the emerging power structure in Egypt? And what does this tell us about al-Nour’s political identity? Recorded on 26 May 2015.

Speaker: Frédéric Vairel, University of Ottawa Discussant: Nawal Mustafa, LSE Chair: John Chalcraft, LSE Frédéric describes how self-limitation works in contemporary Moroccan mobilisation, with particular reference to the 20th February Movement. In 2011, contestation dynamics did not reach national amplitude despite being spread across various parts of the country. Frédéric looks at the institutionalisation of contentious space, shedding light on the relation between contentious space and institutional politics. He also addresses how different actors within contentious spaces calculate their actions and explains why self-limitation is not embedded in a moral economy in Morocco. Recorded on 20 May 2015. This seminar forms part of the 'Social Movements and Popular Mobilisation in the MENA Research Theme'. Image Credit: Hasna Lahmini, Flickr. Protesters carry the Moroccan flag during the February 20 protest in Rabat.

Speaker: Frédéric Vairel, University of Ottawa Chair: John Chalcraft, LSE Most of the existing literature on the 2011 MENA uprisings looks in isolation at either the contentious politics of popular mobilisation or regime responses to them. Frédéric Vairel proposes a move away from this approach in order to understand the Moroccan case, instead considering both sides together by looking at the 20th February Movement and the regime’s response to it. He argues that by resorting to a number of short and long term reforms; toleration, repression and containment of street mobilisation, the regime was able to avoid producing ‘martyrs’, thereby containing potential backlash of the kind experienced elsewhere in the region. Recorded on 19 May 2015. This seminar forms part of the 'Social Movements and Popular Mobilisation in the MENA Research Theme'. Image credit: Thierry Ehrman, Flickr. King Mohammed VI of Morocco painted portrait.

Speaker: Claire Beaugrand, Institut Français du Proche Orient Discussant: Filippo Dionigi, LSE Middle East Centre Chair: John Chalcraft, LSE Bahrain has had a long history of exiling its opponents as a way to regulate political dissent. The 2011 political uprising in Bahrain marked a new phase in the history of Bahraini outmigration and exile politics. The brutal repression with which the protest movement was met (particularly from March to July 2011) led to a new wave of political exile, affecting a wider range of socio-economic categories. With most of the Arab countries, notably Syria, themselves in turmoil and Gulf countries having closed ranks behind the Bahraini government, the destinations of out-migrants also became more limited with the UK and Lebanon on the top of the list. This research examines the forms of opposition and advocacy that were built on previous exile experiences, focusing on a new generation of opponents that includes children of political exiles and long-time expatriates in Bahrai

Speaker: Jonathan Wyrtzen, Yale University Chair: Toby Dodge, LSE Against a dominant historical narrative emphasizing the importance of war-time agreements (Sykes-Picot and others) and the post-World War I peace settlement in "making" the modern Middle East, Jonathan wyrtzen shifts the focus to the post-war decade, examining a set of synchronic "revolts" in the mid-1920s from Morocco to Turkey that were critical in negotiating new political topographies in North Africa and the Middle East. This comparative analysis looks at different typologies of state formation (both by the British, French, Italian, and Spanish colonial powers and by local actors including Ataturk, Ibn Saud, and Abd al-Krim) and of anti-state resistance, emphasising the importance of transregional linkages during this critical historical juncture. Recorded on 17 March 2015. Image Credit: Wikipedia. Sheikh Hilal al-Atrash, Druze rebel leader, during The Great Syrian Revolt.

Speaker: Lahouari Addi, Sciences Po Lyon Chair: John King, Society for Algerian Studies In this lecture, Professor Lahouari Addi discusses the current situation in Algeria, from the sickness and subsequent disappearance of Bouteflika from the public eye, to the protests in the south resisting the exploitation of the country's vast shale gas reserves and, importantly, the future of Algeria's economic situation in the face of declining oil prices. These issues are discussed against the backdrop of a nearing change in presidential leadership. This event was jointly organised by the LSE Middle East Centre and the Society for Algerian Studies. Recorded on 10 March 2015. Abdelaziz Bouteflika painted portrait. Image Credit: Thierry Ehrman, Flickr.

Speaker: Marie Duboc, University of Tübingen Chair: John Chalcraft, LSE This talk focuses on labour protests in Egypt, before and after the fall of Hosni Mubarak. It argues that repression and radicalisation do not fully capture the dynamics of social movements in authoritarian contexts. Instead, it suggests to expand the contentious politics approach, the dominant theoretical framework used to study collective action. Through the study of labour action in Egypt Duboc moves away from approaches apprehending social movements as linear processes, explaining why they can lead to revolutionary situations as well as hinder them. Recorded on 25 February 2015. This seminar forms part of the 'Social Movements and Popular Mobilisation in the MENA Research Theme'. Image Credit: Hossam el-Hamalawy, Flickr. Egyptian workers protest against state-backed Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions.

Speaker: Richard Schofield, King's College London Chair: Madawi Al-Rasheed, LSE Middle East Centre In trying to make sense of the spontaneous appearance of new borderland spatialities in Syria and Iraq, as well as recent instances of formal state boundary-making such as the Abyei arbitration, Richard Schofield asks what constitutes a borderland in the Middle East. Addressing both historical and contemporary concerns, with notable attention being paid to Iran-Iraq and Saudi-Yemen, he argues that developing a more overtly multidisciplinary basis for the study of contested borders will best aid their appreciation and understanding. Recorded on 24 February 2015.