In this podcast, Oxford Emeritus Professor Avi Shlaim compares notes with Exeter University Professor Ilan Pappé on the prospects for a binational state in the aftermath of the events of 7 October and the Gaza War.
A discussion of European initiatives to recognize the State of Palestine to advance the prospects for a two-state solution. In this episode, former Israeli Ambassador and Director General of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Alon Liel speaks with Haizam Amirah-Fernández, Senior Analyst for Mediterranean and Middle Eastern affairs at the Elcano Institute in Madrid, and Chris Doyle, Director of CAABU, the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, to consider European initiat...
Prof Noura Erakat explores the significance of South Africa's application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip before the International Court of Justice, and the Court's decision to hear the case. The Middle East Centre convenes its Hilary Term 2024 seminar each Monday night in term around the theme of 'Political Options Following the Gaza War.' The aim is to bring primarily Palestinian and Israeli speakers each week to discuss the differe...
Dr Hagar Kotef from SOAS examines the current situation of Israeli settlers both in the West Bank and in the Cabinet to assess the impact of the settler movement in political options following the Gaza War. The Middle East Centre convenes its Hilary Term 2024 seminar each Monday night in term around the theme of ‘Political Options Following the Gaza War.’ The aim is to bring primarily Palestinian and Israeli speakers each week to discuss the different options facing policy makers in the aftermat...
In the opening meeting of the Middle East Centre’s Hilary Term seminar series, the Fellows of the Centre led a panel discussion to set out the agenda for the series examining the political options following the Gaza War. The Middle East Centre convenes its Hilary Term 2024 seminar each Monday night in term around the theme of ‘Political Options Following the Gaza War.’ The aim is to bring primarily Palestinian and Israeli speakers each week to discuss the different options facing policy makers i...
Professor Yuli Tamir considers Israeli public opinion following the 7 October 2023 attack and the constraints that public opinion imposes on the political options moving forward. The Middle East Centre convenes its Hilary Term 2024 seminar each Monday night in term around the theme of ‘Political Options Following the Gaza War.’ The aim is to bring primarily Palestinian and Israeli speakers each week to discuss the different options facing policy makers in the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 atta...
Adam Mestyan argues that post-Ottoman Arab political orders were not, as many historians believe, products of European colonialism but of the process of "recycling empire." Adam Mestyan is Associate Professor of History at Duke University. His works include Modern Arab Kingship - Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2023), Primordial History, Print Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo (Ifao, 2021); and Arab Patriotism: Th...
Join Professor Ghassan Salamé for his Lecture on 'Lessons from 2003 Iraq: Twenty Years Later.' Jointly organised by Invisible East and St Antony's College, University of Oxford, with the generous support of the Middle East Centre, the Reza Hosseini Memorial Lecture Series connects individual stories to larger questions on the history and contemporary issues of the Middle East. The series aims to recognise and promote, in particular, micro-histories, oral and documentary history, and fieldwork an...
Professor Yoav di Capua offers a comprehensive empirical, theoretical, and methodological reassessment of the Arab 60s as a global pursuit with lessons that transcend the geography of the Middle East - the fruit of a decade of research on Arab thought. A common understanding of the 1960s is that of an integrated global era marked by a revolutionary quest for self-liberation, transnational solidarity, sexual revolution, radical self-fashioning, anti-imperialism, a renewed understanding of gender ...
Professor Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab offers some reflections on the challenges that a post-2011 Arab critique might be facing. What have the Arab Uprisings done to "Contemporary Arab Thought"? It is an undisputable fact that the Arab uprisings since 2011 have been a most dramatic turn in the Arab region since the founding of the modern Arab states: an unexpected and explainable event that continues to impact Arab life on all levels, including the intellectual. In my talk I look at the new light th...
Professor Avi Shlaim gives the George Antonius Memorial Lecture 2023, examining the Jewish exodus from Iraq in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and arguing the Zionist movement played an active part in the uprooting of Iraqi Jews. This annual lecture is also a launch for Avi Shlaim’s new book, 'Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew' which will be published by Oneworld on 8 June. The three worlds of the title are Baghdad to the age of 5, Ramat Gan, Israel, 10 to 15, and school in London,...
The Director and Fellows of the Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College convened a memorial in honour of Derek Hopwood OBE, Emeritus Fellow in Middle Eastern Studies (1933-2020) and Celia Kerslake, Emeritus Fellow in Turkish (1946-2023). Guest Speakers and times: 0:00 - 4:17 Eugene Rogan, Middle East Centre Director (moderator and opening remarks) 4:17 - 15:30 Roger Goodman, Warden of St Antony's College 15:30 - 21:40 Rosie MacGregor, sister of Celia Kerslake 21:40 - 32.33 Michael Willis, Muhamm...
Women's Rights Research Seminar where guest speaker, Dr Roel Meijer (Guest Lecturer in Islam Studies, Radboud Universiteit) presents on Women’s movements and citizenship in the Middle East. Citizenship is not often mentioned in relation to women in the Middle East. Mostly women’s movements are analyzed in relation to nationalism, Islamism, law, and civil society. Citizenship, however, predates nationalism and Islamism. Moreover it is broader than law and more fundamental than political or religi...
Dr Haytham Alhamwi draws on his personal experiences to explain the story of the conflict in Syria. Through his personal story as a previous political prisoner, he starts by describing the situation in Syria before the Arab Spring in 2011, followed by how the Syrian uprising began, and his personal involvement in the non-violent movement. The presentation will cover how Assad’s regime reacted with lethal force to organised movements asking for change. The uprising escalated to a military conflic...
This lecture examines the resilience of the Iraqi state and nation before and after the 2003 invasion. Since 1980, Iraq weathered the longest conventional war of the 20th century, the Iran-Iraq War, followed by one of the shortest, the 1991 Gulf War, and the subsequent uprisings that swept through 15 of its 18 provinces, and a decade of sanctions. Since the 2003 war, Iraq has witnessed an occupation, the collapse of its national military, an insurgency, a civil war, the ensuing terrorist statele...
The Rt Hon Sir Peter Gross (Formerly, Lead Judge for International Relations) shares his insight into the Judicial and Rule of Law developments in Iraq. Abstract: IRAQ 2018-2019: The Rule of Law: a perspective At the invitation of the President of the Supreme Judicial Council of Iraq, Chief Justice Dr Faiq Zidan, and supported by the FCDO, I visited Iraq in early 2018 and again in 2019, on each occasion to attend the Iraqi Judiciary Day. The visits embodied the success of peer-to-peer Judicial E...
Why did Iraq fail to prove its WMD absence before the 2003 invasion? This seminar examines new evidence from Iraq and United Nations sources to shed light on the internal debates leading up to the 2003 war. Why did the Iraqi regime fail to demonstrate it no longer had WMD prior to the 2003 invasion? For the past twenty years, there has been surprisingly little debate about this key question. In this seminar I draw on primary sources that I have collected from Iraqi sources and the United Nations...
This talk examines the Shi‘ite political parties linked to Iraq's Popular Mobilisation Units (PMU) and their influence over the state, exploring their strategies for legitimacy in politics, religion, and society. Despite their modest performance at the ballot box in comparison to the 2018 parliamentary elections, the Shi‘ite political parties associated with Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Units (PMU) have remained important brokers with sufficient power to steer the government’s decision-making. Ha...
This talk explores the impact of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 on militant Islamism using new evidence. How did the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 affect the evolution of the transnational jihadi movement? The consensus view since the mid-2000s has been that the war fuelled militant Islamism, but there have since been few attempts to specify the effects and identify the mechanisms involved. In this talk I draw on a wide range of unexploited quantitative and qualitative evidence to underst...
The evolution of religion-civil society relations in post-2003 Iraq. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 created a seismic shift in clerical-state relations. For decades, the Shia religious establishment had a contentious relationship with the Iraqi state, who feared their mobilization capacity and persecuted them as a result. After 2003, the Shia religious leadership played a powerful role in political affairs, guiding the country towards a constitutional referendum, earlier-than-planned elec...
Katerina Dalacoura will presents her research project entitled ‘The International Thought of Turkish Islamists’, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. The project engages with the idea of a ‘global International Relations’ by exploring Turkish Islamist thought in the Republican period. Drawing on insights from global intellectual history, it shows that Turkish Islamism evolved in conversation with philosophical and political debates and trends in both Western and Muslim setting...
A Middle East Centre Seminar on Salafism. Salafism was the religious idiom that dominated Egypt's aborted political transition in the wake of the 2011 revolution and up to the 2013 military coup. The leading political actors of the moment all mobilized strands of Salafism in a fight for religious legitimacy against each other: the Salafi Call and its political party al-Nour (itself internally divided), Hazim Abu Isma'il and his movement of revolutionary Salafis, and even the Muslim Brotherhood, ...
A talk with a focus on the contemporary militant group referred to by the acronym ISIS (or ISIL) and its views on the “caliphate.” As this group sees it, its so-called Islamic State represents the resurrection of the historical office of the caliph after its abrogation in 1923. ISIS anchors this position in the concept of “the creed of Abraham” (millat Ibrahim) mentioned in Qur’an 2:124 in order to derive a scriptural and theological mandate for their project. The lecture analyzes how credible t...
Professor Mohammad Khalil scrutinises the claim by New Atheists like Richard Dawkins that Islam is a fundamentally violent religion Is Islam fundamentally violent? For influential New Atheists such as Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Richard Dawkins, the answer is an emphatic yes, largely because of the Islamic doctrine of jihad. According to this view, when al-Qaeda plotted 9/11 or ISIS planned any one of its recent terrorist attacks, they were acting in accord with Islamic scripture. In this p...
Professor Mohammad Khalil scrutinises the claim by New Atheists like Richard Dawkins that Islam is a fundamentally violent religion Is Islam fundamentally violent? For influential New Atheists such as Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Richard Dawkins, the answer is an emphatic yes, largely because of the Islamic doctrine of jihad. According to this view, when al-Qaeda plotted 9/11 or ISIS planned any one of its recent terrorist attacks, they were acting in accord with Islamic scripture. In this p...
How historians can gain new insights from global history, and how historians and histories of Iran can contribute Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Annual Lecture - Centres, Peripheries and New Histories of the Left in Iran What can historians working on Iran gain from new insights generated in sprawling fields associated with global history such as global urban history and global intellectual history; and what can historians and histories of Iran contribute to these fields? With examples from recent an...
Prof. Esther Hertzog gives a talk on the vulnerable situation of motherhood in the Israeli welfare state. This talk will examine the role of state authorities, especially the welfare system and the courts, in undermining disadvantaged women's motherhood. State authorities undermine mothers' custodial rights over their offspring, especially through the discourse on 'child's wellbeing' and 'parental capability', blaming mothers for physically endangering and neglecting their children. It will be a...
Helen Lackner speaks about Yemen’s enduring crisis. Helen Lackner updates the seminar on the Yemeni war, providing a brief analysis of the origins of the conflict and addressing the main constraints and perspectives for the future. While focusing on the domestic aspects of the situation, she puts them in the regional context and also address the role of the international allies of the major parties involved.
Professor Joseph Sassoon in conversation with Dr Michael Willis about his recent book, The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty (Allen Lane, Penguin Group, 2022). Emeritus Professor Avi Shlaim joins them. Abstract: The influential merchants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped the globalization of today. The Sassoons, a Baghdadi-Jewish trading family, built a global trading enterprise by taking advantage of major historical developments durin...
Dr Raphaël Lefèvre in conversation with Dr Neil Ketchley about his recent book, 'Jihad in the City: Militant Islamism and Contentious Politics in Tripoli' (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Militant Islamists are often assumed to be driven by global goals and transnational networks. But this narrative misses a crucial point: from Tawhid during the Lebanese civil war to Tahrir al-Sham in the current Syrian conflict, Islamist armed groups often seek to recruit and mobilize local communities not a...
