LSE Middle East Centre Podcasts

غزة مفتوحة: عمران الأمل by LSE Middle East Centre

This webinar launched the book 'Open Gaza: Architectures of Hope' edited by Deen Sharp and the late Michael Sorkin. The Gaza Strip is one of the most beleaguered environments on earth. Crammed into a space of 139 square miles (360 square kilometers), 1.8 million people live under an Israeli siege, enforcing conditions that continue to plummet to ever more unimaginable depths of degradation and despair. Gaza, however, is more than an endless encyclopedia of depressing statistics. It is also a place of fortitude, resistance, and imagination; a context in which inhabitants go to remarkable lengths to create the ordinary conditions of the everyday and to reject their exceptional status. Inspired by Gaza’s inhabitants, this book builds on the positive capabilities of Gazans. It brings together designers, environmentalists, planners, activists, and scholars from Palestine and Israel, the US, the UK, India, and elsewhere to create hopeful interventions that imagine a better place for Gazans and Palestinians. Open Gaza engages with the Gaza Strip within and beyond the logics of siege and warfare, it considers how life can be improved inside the limitations imposed by the Israeli blockade and outside the idiocy of violence and warfare.

GCC countries share their national wealth with citizens through public employment and subsidies, policies that are inefficient, inequitable, economically distortive and fiscally unsustainable. This talk discusses how unconditional cash grants for adult nationals could replace government jobs and subsidies, drawing on Dr Steffen Hertog’s recent research on Kuwait. Dr Hertog's PowerPoint presentation can be viewed at https://www.lse.ac.uk/middle-east-centre/events/2021/reforming-the-Gulf-rentier-state.

This webinar was the launch of Alexander Hamilton's latest report 'Is Demography Destiny? The Economic Implications of Iraq's Demography' published under the LSE Conflict Research Programme–Iraq. In this report, Hamilton examines the fiscal and economic implications of Iraq’s current demographic trajectory and finds that, given Iraq’s almost total dependence on oil for government revenues, slight changes in the demographic transition rate could result in significant cumulative per capita expenditure changes – equivalent to $2.9bn. This paper combines the data on Iraq’s demography with projections on economic growth and oil revenues to examine how variations in demographic transition might affect public finances and hence the viability of the current social contract and offers recommendations for policy-makers.

In a recent cabinet meeting in Tehran, President Rouhani stated "Trump is dead but the nuclear deal is still alive". From the Iranian perspective, the ball is now in the United States' court to mend relations after former President Trump's policy of maximum pressure, including the withdrawal from the nuclear deal and the reimposition of sanctions on Iran. This webinar discussed what the short-term prospects are for US-Iran relations under the Biden administration. Hassan Ahmadian is an Assistant Professor of Middle East and North Africa studies at the University of Tehran and an Associate of the Project on Shi'ism and Global Affairs at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He is also a Middle East security and politics fellow at the Center for Strategic Research, Tehran. Dr. Ahmadian received his PhD in Area Studies from the University of Tehran and undertook a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Iran Project, Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Fluent in Arabic, Persian, and English, his research and teaching is mainly focused on Iran’s foreign policy and international relations, political change, civil-military relations, and Islamist movements in the Middle East. Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi is a Visiting Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre and Senior Research Fellow at the International Security Studies department at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI, London). She is also a Non-Resident Associate Fellow in the Research Division at the NATO Defence College (NDC, Rome). Her research is concerned with security and geopolitics in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Iran and Iraq’s foreign and domestic politics, drivers of radicalisation, and drones proliferation. Ali Vaez is Iran Project Director and Senior Adviser to the President at International Crisis Group. He led Crisis Group’s efforts in helping to bridge the gaps between Iran and the P5+1 that led to the landmark 2015 nuclear deal. Previously, he served as a Senior Political Affairs Officer at the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and was the Iran Project Director at the Federation of American Scientists. He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

This webinar will be the launch of Yezid Sayigh's latest report 'Praetorian Spearhead: The Role of the Military in the Evolution of Egypt’s State Capitalism 3.0' published under the LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series. In this report, Sayigh explores how military involvement in the Egyptian economy is giving rise to a new version of state capitalism. Driven by Arab socialism in the 1960s and reshaped by privatisation in the 1990s, under President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi the state has sought to bend the private sector to its capital investment strategy while continuing to profess commitment to free market economics. His administration seeks private sector investment, but exclusively on its own terms. This is demonstrated through the expansion and diversion of military economic activity in five sectors: real estate development, creation of industrial and transport hubs, rentier or extractive activities related to natural resources, relations with the private sector, and the effort to increase the state’s financial efficiency while seeking private investment to help capitalise the public sector. This approach may generate macro-level economic growth and improve the efficiency of public finances, but it also reinforces the grip of the state rather than consolidating free markets. Reflecting this, private sector investment in the economy is lower today than it was in the socialist phase of the 1960s. Yezid Sayigh is Senior Fellow at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, where he leads the programme on Civil-Military Relations in Arab States (CMRAS). His work focuses on the comparative political and economic roles of Arab armed forces and non-state actors, the impact of war on states and societies, the politics of post-conflict reconstruction and security sector transformation in Arab transitions, as well as authoritarian resurgence. He is the author most recently of ‘Owners of the Republic: An Anatomy of Egypt’s Military Economy’ (2019).

PLEASE NOTE: We apologise for any Arabic interference you may hear during the recording which was due to technical difficulties. This webinar will be the launch of Professor Madawi Al-Rasheed's latest book The Son King: Reform and Repression in Saudi Arabia. In this book, Madawi Al-Rasheed lays bare the world of repression behind Saudi crown prince Muhammed bin Salman's reforms. She dissects the Saudi regime’s propaganda and progressive new image, while also dismissing Orientalist views that despotism is the only pathway to stable governance in the Middle East. Charting old and new challenges to the fragile Saudi nation from the kingdom’s very inception, this blistering book exposes the dangerous contradictions at the heart of the Son King’s Saudi Arabia. If you would like to purchase this book please visit Hurst Publisher's website and use the code SONKING25 at checkout for 25% off. Madawi Al-Rasheed is Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics Middle East Centre and a Fellow of the British Academy. Since joining the MEC, Madawi has been conducting research on mutations among Saudi Islamists after the 2011 Arab uprisings. This research focuses on the new reinterpretations of Islamic texts prevalent among a small minority of Saudi reformers and the activism in the pursuit of democratic governance and civil society. The result of this research project, sponsored by the Open Society Foundation Fellowship Programme, appeared in a monograph entitled Muted Modernists (2015, Hurst & OUP). Her latest edited book, Salman’s Legacy: The Dilemmas of a New Era was also published by Hurst in 2018.

This webinar was organised as part of the LSE Middle East Centre's 10th anniversary programme of online events. For a decade, the LSE Middle East Centre has been committed to rigorous research of the societies, economies, politics and cultures of the Middle East and North Africa. This event, as part of the Centre’s 10th anniversary campaign, will look at some of the main challenges facing the region and its people over the next few years, and how the discipline of Middle East Studies should be adapting to address the areas of ecological and demographic change, healthcare in the region, and decolonising the study of the ‘Middle East’. As researchers become more and more preoccupied with understanding the implications of living in the so-called Anthropocene, there is still limited work on the impact of climatic stresses in MENA countries, including their relationship with demographic shifts, rapid urbanisation, natural resources depletion and growing pollution. Protracted conflicts in the region have undoubtedly led to decimated healthcare systems, and in the absence of a collective regional response to the COVID-19 pandemic, national measures have amplified inequalities between and within countries in terms of access to adequate healthcare. Academia is facing long and overdue calls to recognise and address unexamined legacies of colonial domination, notably around race, gender and sexuality. Students are at the forefront of these demands, which stretch beyond the teaching curriculum to research and university governance. It was an Orientalist gaze that created the ‘Middle East’, and other geographical imaginaries (e.g. ‘Western Asia’) may now be more appropriate. Decolonising Middle East Studies could take up an entire webinar in itself, so we are focusing on one particular element of decolonisation - writing about race in the Middle East.

Across many developing countries, the delivery of basic social services is not universal, and often skewed along politicised identity cleavages. The Middle East and North Africa region is no exception. Under what conditions are some services provided in a more ‘equitable’ fashion, with less apparent favouritism towards particular groups? Drawing on the cases of health care provision in Lebanon and Turkey, this webinar explored this question. Health provision is an area where public delivery is often discretionary, running along partisan, ethnic, or religious identity lines. Featuring work by Melani Cammett, the first part of the webinar explored new empirical evidence on how societal divisions affect the quality of service delivery in Lebanon. In the second part of the webinar, drawing on the case of Turkey under AKP rule, Asli Cansunar discussed how a government, because of its political goals, designed an effective and universal policy which widened health coverage and electorally paid out the incumbent AK Parti.

This webinar was organised with the Society for Algerian Studies. In 1990, a year after the creation of the Arab Maghreb Union (UMA), the then-King of Morocco, Hassan II, best summed up pan-Maghreb ambitions stating that: “our aim is to turn the Arab Maghreb into one country with one passport... one identity and a single currency”. Thirty years on, very little has been achieved at the leadership-level in integrating these countries, therefore defying the economic forces of gravity. The last meeting of the UMA that brought together all five members was in 1994, with the borders between Algeria and Morocco closed ever since. Tensions over the Western Sahara issue also continue to obstruct relations between the two regional heavyweights. The webinar explored the historical background, political rationale behind, and economic consequences of the stalled Maghreb Union project. Panellists covered various perspectives as well as highlighted opportunities facing the least (economically) integrated region in the world.