LSE Middle East Centre Podcasts

Speaker: Filippo Dionigi, LSE Middle East Centre Chair: Toby Dodge, LSE Middle East Centre In this event, Filippo Dionigi discusses how states such as Lebanon and Jordan have coped with the challenges of mass displacement within their borders. He will pose questions and advance hypotheses on the current and future implications of forced mass displacement in the Middle East for states in the region.

Speaker: Katerina Dalacoura, LSE Chair: Zeynep Kaya, LSE Middle East Centre Building on a long intellectual tradition going back to the late Ottoman period, debates in present-day Turkey on the role of culture and civilisation in world politics, and the relationship between modernity and Islam, are vibrant and ongoing. This lecture discusses whether there exist, within this body of thought, new possibilities of going beyond the familiar categories of East and West, secularism and Islam. It asks whether alternative universalist understandings of culture and civilisation in world politics are on offer, or a chimera. Recorded on 2 March 2016. Image description: In 1914, Abdullah Cevdet, an Ottoman intellectual, advocated the wholesale acceptance of Western civilization ‘with its roses and thorns’.

Speaker: Andrew Hammond, University of Oxford Chair: Courtney Freer, LSE Kuwait Programme Despite the large presence of Salafism in Arabic political and religious discourse today, the term remains in fact highly contested and its history unclear. Yet Salafism, with its semantic confusions, is finding its way from Arabic and the Saudi sphere into Turkey and the Turkish language, which had been as a last bastion against its ideological spread. How did it happen, what are its consequences? Recorded on 1 March 2016. Image Credit: Ekremsaringoz, Pixabay.

Speaker: Benedetta Voltolini, Sciences Po Paris & LSE Middle East Centre Chair: Dr Federica Bicchi, LSE Benedetta Voltolini presents her paper investigating lobbying and framing in EU foreign policy towards the Middle East and North Africa. By relying on social network analysis and the literature on policy entrepreneurship, Benedetta will show how non-state actors are involved in processes of framing and knowledge construction, how frames become collective and under what conditions framing processes take place. EU foreign policy toward the Middle East and North Africa will be used as a case study. Recorded on 9 February 2016.

Speaker: Jonathan Hill, King's College London Chair: William Sinton, Society for Algerian Studies The Arab Spring’s influence on the Maghreb has been piecemeal and partial. What explains these varied experiences? Why did Ben Ali’s regime fall and Bouteflika’s survive? Why has Morocco not gone the same way as Tunisia? And what of Mauritania, the oft forgotten and frequently ignored other Maghreb country? Jonathan Hill addresses these and other questions, analysing and comparing Morocco’s, Algeria’s, Tunisia’s and Mauritania’s political development over the past 10 years. Recorded on 3 February 2016. This event is jointly organised by the LSE Middle East Centre and the Society for Algerian Studies. Image credit: Copyright: EPA/Karim Selmaoui. Protest in Rabat, Morocco on 20 February 2011 demanding political reforms.

Speaker: Choukri Hmed, Paris Dauphine University Chair: John Chalcraft, LSE Tunisia is frequently known as the small “noiseless country” of the MENA that achieved its political transition and successfully managed to avoid civil war and authoritarian consolidation. Based on an ongoing fieldwork, Choukri Hmed presents his paper which, without undermining these political outcomes, proposes an analysis of the (un)changing frames and issues in both social movements and the political field in the country. Recorded on 2 February 2016. This seminar forms part of the 'Social Movements and Popular Mobilisation in the MENA Research Theme'. Image credit: Ezequiel Scagnetti, European Parliament Flickr. Demonstration ahead of Tunisian Constituent Assembly elections in 2011.

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.