Middle East Centre

Part of the Middle East Centre Women's Rights Research Seminars. With Dr Mine Yildirim Chair: Dr Nazila Ghanea (Department for Continuing Education,University of Oxford). The place of women in the religious space of mosques in Turkey has been a long debate- more so recently. The Women in Mosques Movement’s challenge of the quality of space allocated for women in mosques led to strong criticism but also aroused genuine discussion about the deeply held beliefs underlying the place given to women as well as the space women carve out for themselves. The seminar will explore the implications of international human rights law, particularly women’s right to freedom of religion or belief, for the key demands of the Women in Mosques Movement. Bio – Dr. Mine YILDIRIM is the Head of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee’s Freedom of Belief Initiative project and Member of the OSCE/ODIHR Panel of Experts on Freedom of Religion or Belief. She a scholar of human rights law and an expert on international protection of freedom of religion or belief. She is the founder of the Freedom of Belief Initiative, and works with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee on this Initiative monitoring and reporting on freedom of religion or belief in Turkey. Yildirim is a member of the OSCE/ODIHR Panel of Experts on Freedom of Religion or Belief. Her work covers different facets of religious freedom, including the collective dimension of freedom of religion or belief, gender dimension of freedom of religion or belief, religious minorities and freedom of religion or belief in education. She was the co-recipient of the Stefanus Prize in 2016. She received her doctoral degree at AAbo Akademi Institute for Human Rights with her thesis on the collective dimension of freedom of religion or belief. Her doctoral thesis is published as a book entitled The Collective Dimension of Freedom of Religion: A Case Study on Turkey. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the academic journal Religion & Human Rights and has published extensively in academic journals and contributes to Forum 18. She has served as a consultant on numerous international projects.

Maryam Alemzadeh (Princeton) Siavush Randjbar-Daemi (St Andrews), author of The Quest for Authority in Iran: a history of the presidency from revolution to Rouhani (2017), give a talk for the Middle East Centre Friday Seminar Series. Chaired Professor Edmund Herzig (Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford) Scholars have shown the dictatorial function of the parallel political system of the Islamic Republic: although the authoritarian office of supreme leadership and the security apparatuses strictly limit the quasi-democratic institutions (i.e. the presidency and the parliament), they avert any criticism of the government’s malfunction to the latter, thereby saving ideological face among dedicated supporters. In this functionalist explanation of the dual system of power, the qualitative difference of the two sides’ working mechanisms goes unnoticed. In this talk I address the organizational dynamics of the nonconventional section of state in Iran, with a special focus on the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. I demonstrate that behind the security apparatus Panopticon and its capillary power lies a “revolutionary” institution—one that tolerates and encourages revolutionary direct action, thereby sustaining a sizable popular base over the years. The popular base is not necessarily brainwashed to serve the state. Rather, I argue, institutions of power keep it committed and interested by authorizing spontaneous, direct action, even though revolutionary times are long passed. Maryam Alemzadeh-Bio Maryam Alemzadeh is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University's Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies. She earned her PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago in 2018, and has previously worked as the Grinspoon Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Maryam is a historical and cultural sociologist of revolutions, state building, and grassroots militias, specializing on Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Based on detailed historical findings, she writes about cultural practices as a sociologist, and about contemporary US-Middle East politics as an Iran expert. Her work has appeared in the British Journal of Middle East Studies and Foreign Affairs, among other places.

Alaa Al Aswany, author of The Dictatorship Syndrome (2019), gives a talk for the Middle East Centre seminar series. Chaired by Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony's College, Oxford) Alaa Al Aswany is Egypt’s most celebrated novelist and essayist whose books are runaway bestsellers in Arabic and have been translated into more than 30 languages. His second novel, The Yacoubian Building (2002) established Al Aswany as a global literary figure. This was followed by Chicago (2007), The Automobile Club (2013), and most recently, The So-called Republic (2018). A newspaper columnist until he was banned from publishing by the Egyptian government, Al Aswany has published a number of works of non-fiction treating on current affairs, including On the State of Egypt: What Made the Revolution Inevitable (2011), and Democracy is the Answer: Egypt’s Years of Revolution (2015). His most recent book is The Dictatorship Syndrome (2020), where he considers the conditions, signs, symptoms, and cures for what he terms the malady of dictatorship. The study of dictatorship in the West has acquired an almost exotic dimension. But authoritarian regimes remain a painful reality for billions of people worldwide who still live under them, their freedoms violated and their rights abused. They are subject to arbitrary arrest, torture, corruption, ignorance, and injustice. What is the nature of dictatorship? How does it take hold? In what conditions and circumstances is it permitted to thrive? And how do dictators retain power, even when reviled and mocked by those they govern? In this deeply considered and at times provocative short work, Alaa Al Aswany tells us that, as with any disease, to understand the syndrome of dictatorship we must first consider the circumstances of its emergence, along with the symptoms and complications it causes in both the people and the dictator.

Book launch for the new book Palestinian Refugees in International Law by Lex Takkenberg and Francesca Albanese. Lex Takkenberg (Former chief of the Ethics Office at the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) Francesca Albanese (The Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM), Georgetown University) The Palestinian refugee question, resulting from the events surrounding the creation of the state of Israel over seventy years ago, remains one of the largest, most protracted, and most politically fraught refugee questions of the post-WWII era. Numbering over seven million in the Middle East alone, Palestinian refugees’ status varies considerably according to the state or territory ‘hosting’ them, the UN agency assisting them and political circumstances surrounding the Question of Palestine. International law, while being crucial to the protection of these refugees, remains marginal in political discussions concerning their fate. This new book, building on the seminal contribution of the first edition (1998), aims to bring order and logic into a matter which is politically fraught, discussing the legal status of Palestinian refugees in a historical and factual fashion, building on extensive research of international and national legal norms and systems, doctrine and jurisprudence alike. It offers a comprehensive and compelling analysis of various areas of international law (refugee law, human rights law, humanitarian law, the law relating to stateless persons, principles related to internally displaced persons, as well as notions of international criminal law), and probes their relevance to Palestinian refugees. It so manages to be innovative in a field of study where much has been written in either general terms (discussing Palestinian refugees as part of the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict) or specific terms (discussing specific issues pertaining to Palestinian refugees e.g. which UN agency is responsible for them, their right of return and compensation, Palestinian in Lebanon, in Jordan, in Egypt), without any other manuscripts being able to offer the broad picture of Palestinian (refugees’) continuous dispersal and protection issues. The new edition includes: a wealth of information concerning origins, crucial facts and legal tenets of the Palestinian refugee question; an updated analysis of the distinctive regime set up for them, made of a plurality of UN agencies (UNCCP, UNRWA and UNHCR); a rigorous analysis of current interpretations of Article 1D of the 1951 Refugee Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and the various definitions of Palestinian refugees; a detailed examination of specific rights of these refugees and a the protection regime they are afforded; an innovative framework for solutions, building on important development in the field of refugee law and practice and on a holistic rights-based approach. This book makes for an indispensable reading to anyone willing to get a better understanding of the Palestinian refugee question and its resolution. Being so painstakingly researched, this book is meant to be, for many years to come, the ultimate reference about Palestinian refugees.

Professor Gregory Gause (Head of International Affairs Department, The Bush School of Government and Public Service) gives a talk on Saudi Arabia crown prince Muhammad bin Salman. Introduced by Dr Toby Matthiesen (St. Antony's College, Oxford. Since his father King Salman assumed the throne in 2015, his son Prince Muhammad bin Salman has been the driving force behind Saudi domestic and foreign policy, since 2017 as crown prince. While it is incontestable that the young prince has made substantial changes in the kingdom, just how significant and lasting will they be? This talk will explore this question in four areas: economic policy, social policy, regional foreign policy and the politics of the ruling family. F. Gregory Gause, III is Professor and John H. Lindsey '44 Chair of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A and M University, as well as serving as head of School's Department of International Affairs and as an affiliate faculty member of the School's Albritton Center for Grand Strategy. He was previously on the faculties of the University of Vermont (1995-2014) and Columbia University (1987-1995) and was Fellow for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (1993-1994). During the 2009-10 academic year he was Kuwait Foundation Visiting Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. In spring 2009 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the American University in Kuwait. In spring 2010 he was a research fellow at the King Faisal Center for Islamic Studies and Research in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. From 2012 to 2015 he was a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Doha Center. His research focuses on the international politics of the Middle East, particularly the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, and American foreign policy toward the region. He has published three books, most recently The International Relations of the Persian Gulf (Cambridge University Press, 2010). His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Middle East Journal, Security Studies, Journal of Democracy, Washington Quarterly, National Interest, and in other journals and edited volumes. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University in 1987 and his B.A. (summa cum laude) from St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia in 1980. He studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo (1982-83) and Middlebury College (1984).

Peter Hill (Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne), gives a talk on his new book, Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda. Chaired by Professor Eugene Rogan (St. Antony's College, Oxford). Peter is a historian of the modern Middle East, specialising in the intellectual and cultural history of the nineteenth-century Arab world. He is currently Vice Chancellor's Research Fellow in History at Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and was previously a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. His research focusses on political thought and practice, the politics of religion, and translation and intercultural exchanges. He also has a strong interest in comparative and global history. Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda, Peter's first book, is published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. He has also published a number of articles on translation and political thought in the Middle East, in journals such as Past and Present, Journal of Arabic Literature, and Intellectual History Review. Exploring the 'Nahda', a cultural renaissance in the Arab world responding to massive social change, this study presents a crucial and often overlooked part of the Arab world's encounter with global capitalist modernity, an interaction which reshaped the Middle East over the course of the long nineteenth century. Seeing themselves as part of an expanding capitalist civilization, Arab intellectuals approached the changing world of the mid-nineteenth century with confidence and optimism, imagining utopian futures for their own civilizing projects. By analyzing the works of crucial writers of the period, including Butrus al-Bustani and Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, alongside lesser-known figures such as the prolific journalist Khalil al-Khuri and the utopian visionary Fransis Marrash of Aleppo, Peter Hill places these visions within the context of their local class- and state-building projects in Ottoman Syria and Egypt, which themselves formed part of a global age of capital. By illuminating this little-studied early period of the Arab Nahda movement, Hill places the transformation of the Arab region within the context of world history, inviting us to look beyond the well-worn categories of 'traditional' versus 'modern'.

Professor Toby Dodge, LSE, gives a talk for the Middle East Studies Centre seminar series. Chaired by Dr Toby Matthiesen (St. Antony's College, Oxford). The assassination, on 2 January 2020, of Qasim Sulimani, the Commander of the Quds Force of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the senior commander of Al-Hashd Al-Sha'abi and the founder of Kata'ib Hezbollah militia, has thrown Iraqi and wider regional politics into turmoil. However, Iraqi politics were already in a state of tumult with its the major cities in the south and central of the country racked by a large and sustained protest movement. These avowedly secular and nationalist demonstrations called for the overthrow of Iraq's post-2003 system, the Muhasasa Ta'ifiya, and the politically sanctioned corruption at is core. Iraq’s ruling elite first responded by issuing unrealistic promises of further spending and jobs. When this failed, they used overt and covert violence, spearheaded by the militias Muhandis controlled, in an attempt to suppress the movement. In the wake of both the assassinations and the protest movement, the future of Iraqi politics is in the balance. Those who run the militias at the core of Al-Hashd Al-Sha’abi and those that have been demonstrating on the stress of Iraqi cities have radically different visions for Iraq’s future. This talk will investigate the ideological organisation and actions of the major actors in Iraqi politics and where the country maybe heading.

Professor Jonathan Brown, Georgetown University, gives a talk for the Middle East seminar series. Chaired by Dr Usaama al-Azami (St Antony's College). What do we do when our legal system produces results that seem unjust? If we believe that our legal system is itself just, how do we even understand our perception of its unjust outcomes? These are global questions, but ones that have been particularly vexing for Muslims and their tradition of Shariah law. This talk will discuss how Muslims have tackled this issue, in particular when confronted with the challenges of adapting or reforming God's law.

Panel discussion looking at US, Iranian and Iraqi politics after the Qasim Sulemani assassination. Held in Oxford on Monday, 20th January 2020 Speakers:, Maj Gen Felix Gedney (Academic Visitor at St Antony's College), Emma Sky OBE (Yale Jackson Institution), Lt. Gen. Sir Simon Mayall KBE, CB (Middle East Advisor at the Ministry of Defence), Dr Toby Matthiesen (St Antony's College)

Ambassador Wilks CMG (HM British Ambassador to Iraq), gives a talk for the Middle East Centre seminar series. Jon Wilks has just finished a two year posting as UK Ambassador to Iraq, his third posting to Iraq since he reopened the Embassy in Baghdad in 2003. He has served 30 years in the UK diplomatic service with a Middle East focus, including Ambassadorial postings to Yemen (10-11) and Oman (14-17). He was also UK Syria Envoy 2012-2014. He is a fluent Arabist and was the first UK Arabic Spokesperson based in the region 2007-2009. He will be taking up a new Ambassadorial appointment in the region next year. His deep interest in Middle East Politics and International Relations led him to take a sabbatical to complete an MA in Middle East Politics at Durham University (99/00) and an MPhil in International Relations at St Antony’s (00/02). He is a previous speaker at the Middle East Centre having shared his reflections with us on his posting to Yemen in 2011 and his Syria responsibilities in 2014.