Middle East Monitor Conversations

MEMO speaks to Ross Caputi about the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, the siege of Fallujah and building an oral history archive made up of Iraqi voices and stories. Caputi served in the US marine corps and was stationed in Iraq, but grew disillusioned with the war and became an anti-war activist. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the Department of History in the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is also helping to build an archive made up of Iraqi testimonies and memories and is the author of The Sacking of Fallujah: A People's History.  

Sufi movements in Iran: MEMO speaks to Seema Golestaneh who is an assistant professor at Cornell University in the department of Near East Studies. We discuss Dr Golestaneh's new book 'Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran' which looks at the social and material life of gnosis (ma'arifat) for disparate Sufi communities in Iran. We also discuss the situation of Sufis in Iran today and the politics around different movements. 

In December 2022, the United Nations' general assembly passed a resolution asking the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on the legality of Israel's occupation of Palestinian land.  MEMO speaks to Hugh Lovatt about whether this is a major milestone and what we can expect from this. Hugh Lovatt is a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Lovatt has focussed extensively on regional geopolitics and advised European policymakers on the conflicts in Israel-Palestine and Western Sahara. He is regularly interviewed and quoted in international media, including by the New York Times, BBC, Christian Science Monitor, Financial Times, AFP, Le Monde, France24, and Al Jazeera. 

MEMO talks to Al Jazeera's correspondent in the West Bank Nida Ibrahim about her journey into journalism, covering Palestine and the killing of her colleague Shireen Abu Akleh.   

MEMO caught up with Israeli comedian and activist Noam Shuster Eliassi to discuss the new Israeli government, doing comedy in Arabic, English and Hebrew and going viral on Arabic-language social media. Born to an Iranian-Jewish mother and Romanian Jewish father and raised in Neve Shalom/Wahat As-Salam or the 'Oasis of Peace', a community in Jerusalem where Jews and Palestinians live together by choice, Noam grew up speaking Arabic.  She attended the New York Film Academy,  Brandies and Harvard School of Divinity.  An activist who has worked in Rwanda and Palestine, Noam was the co-founder of Interpeace. She toured the United States with her own 1-woman comedy show and was the subject of an Al Jazeera documentary. 

MEMO met up with Dr Suja Sawafta to discuss granting Palestinians permission to narrate their history through popular culture and Nexflix's recent offering Farha.Sawafta is an Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami. She is currently working on her first book project which examines the impact of exile, intellectual commitment and political dissent in the works of the formative Saudi-Iraqi novelist Abdulrahman Munif. She teaches interdisciplinary content courses on literature and cinema as well as Arabic and French language.

Christiana Parreira is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations and Political Science at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research focuses on the role of local political institutions and actors in governance, looking primarily at post-conflict contexts in the Middle East and North Africa. Her forthcoming book project examines how local governments and elections facilitated predatory state-building practices in Lebanon. In other research, she examines determinants of governance quality and distributive outcomes in Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere in the Global South. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2020. Before joining the Graduate Institute, she served as a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and a pre-doctoral associate at the Harvard Kennedy School's Middle East Initiative.

Join us for a conversation with Ayse Zarakol as we discuss her latest book on politics and world order before the rise of the West, the Mongol Empire and how Turkey adjusted to the International political system in the 20th and 21st centuries. Ayşe Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at Emmanuel College. Her research is at the intersection of IR and historical sociology, focusing on East-West relations in the international system, history and future of world order(s), conceptualisations of modernity and sovereignty, rising and declining powers, and Turkish politics in a comparative perspective. She is the author of After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which deals with international stigmatisation and the integration of defeated non-Western powers (Turkey after WWI, Japan after WWII and Russia after the Cold War) into the international system, and the editor of the prize winning Hierarchies in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Her articles have appeared in journals such as International Organization, International Theory, International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, among others. Her new book, Before the West: the Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders, which advances an alternative global history of world orders for IR, was published in March 2022 by Cambridge University Press. 

MEMO's conversation with senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an assistant research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary, Dr Shadi Hamid to discuss democracy in the Middle East and the US' policy in the region. Hamid has authored a number of books including The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East and the Rise and Fall of an Idea and Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World which was shortlisted for the 2017 Lionel Gelber Prize for best book on foreign affairs. Hamid is also a contributing writer at the Atlantic, where he writes a monthly essay on culture and politics. In 2019, he was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine.

MEMO speaks with history instructor and cultural heritage consultant Charles Al Hayek to discuss Lebanese history and culture and the ways he has been working to reconnect citizens to it.Al Hayek was a resident writer at the Centre of Arts and Humanities, American University of Beirut (AUB) (2020-2021) where he worked on writing and producing a series of short documentaries, Lebanon's centennial: a hundred years of fact and fiction. Al Hayek is currently completing an MA in Arab and Middle Eastern History at the Centre for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies, AUB.