Middle East Centre Booktalk

Dr. Diana Galeeva introduces her book which examines the relations between the Gulf States and Russia from the Soviet era to the present day. In recent decades Russia has played an increasingly active role in the Middle East as states within the region continue to diversify their relations with major external powers. Yet the role of specific Russian regions, especially those that share an 'Islamic identity' with the GCC has been overlooked. In this book Diana Galeeva examines the relations between the Gulf States and Russia from the Soviet era to the present day. Using the Republic of Tatarstan, one of Russia's Muslim polities as a case study, Galeeva demonstrates the emergence of relations between modern Tatarstan and the GCC States, evolving from concerns with economic survival to a rising paradiplomacy reliant on shared Islamic identities. Having conducted fieldwork in the Muslim Republics of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and Dagestan, the book includes interviews with high-ranking political figures, heads of religious organisations and academics. Moving beyond solely economic and geopolitical considerations, the research in this book sheds light on the increasingly important role that culture and shared Islamic identity play in paradiplomacy efforts. The person who asks the best question from the audience during the audience Q&A will be gifted a copy of the book from the author Dr. Diana Galeeva is a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and a Non-Resident Fellow with the Gulf International Forum. She has previously been an Academic Visitor to St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford (2019-2022). Dr. Galeeva is the author of two books, “Qatar: The Practice of Rented Power” (Routledge, 2022) and “Russia and the GCC: The Case of Tatarstan’s Paradiplomacy” (I.B. Tauris/ Bloomsbury, 2023). She is also a co-editor of the collection “Post-Brexit Europe and UK: Policy Challenges Towards Iran and the GCC States” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Diana’s academic papers and public engagement pieces have appeared in International Affairs, The RUSI Journal, Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, Journal of Islamic Studies, Middle East Institute, King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies, Gulf International Forum, and the LSE Middle East Centre. She has presented her research at Oxford University, Cambridge University, LSE, Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, George Mason University, and MGIMO. Dr Galeeva was a convenor of the international conference ‘Russia and the Muslim World: Through the Lens of Shared Islamic Identities’ (Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, 2021) and a co-director of the workshop ‘Post-Brexit Britain, Europe and Policy towards Iran and the GCC states: Potential Challenges, and the Possibility of Cooperation (Cambridge University, Gulf Research Meeting, 2019). Dr. Galeeva completed her bachelor’s at Kazan Federal University (Russia), she holds an MA from Exeter University (UK) and a Ph.D. from Durham University (UK). https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/russia-and-the-gcc-9780755646166/

This lecture explores Israel’s secret relations with its neighbors during the years 1948-2022. In order to survive in a hostile environment in the Middle East, Israeli decision makers developed a pragmatic regional foreign policy, designed to find ways to approach states, leaders and minorities willing to cooperate with it against mutual regional challenges (such as the Periphery Alliance with Iran and Turkey (until 1979), the Kurds, the Maronites in Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, South Sudan and more). Contacts with these potential partners were mostly covert. The aim of this lecture, which is part of a new comprehensive book on Israel’s secret relations with its neighbors during the years 1948-2022 is two-fold: First, to offer a theoretical framework explaining the way Israel conducted its covert diplomacy; and second, to focus on several less-known episodes of such clandestine activity, such as Israel’s ties with Saudi Arabia and Gulf in general. The research is based on three types of sources: archival material (mainly Israeli, but also British and American); media (newspapers, Internet, etc.); and more than 100 personal interviews with leading Israeli officials involved in this secret activity in the Mossad, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Intelligence. Elie Podeh is Bamberger and Fuld Professor in the History of the Muslim Peoples in the Department of Islamic and Middle East Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He served as the Department Chair during the years 2004-2009, and President of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Association of Israel (MEISAI) during the years 2016-2022. Since 2011 he is Board Member of Mitvim – The Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies. He has published and edited fourteen books and more than eighty academic articles in English, Hebrew and Arabic. His most recent book is Israel’s Secret Relations with States and Minorities in the Middle East, 1948-2020 (Hebrew, 2022; and English forthcoming).

Dr Hertog presents the key arguments of his new short monograph “Locked Out of Development: Insiders and Outsiders in Arab Capitalism” published by Cambridge University Press. The book argues against the received wisdom that neo-liberal reforms are the main culprit explaining slow growth, corruption and inequality across low- to mid-income Arab countries. It instead proposes that it is the uneven presence of the state – over-protecting some while neglecting others – that accounts for the region’s lopsided development and creates deep insider-outsider divides in Arab economies. On the labour market these divides run between protected public sector workers on one hand and precarious workers in the informal private sector on the other; among firms, the divides run between crony insider companies and small, unconnected firms in the informal economy. Uneven state intervention and insider-outsider divisions reinforce each other and together contribute to an equilibrium of weak productivity and skill formation, which in turn deepens insider-outsider divides. While some of these features are generic to developing countries, others are regionally specific, including the relative importance and historical ambition of the state in the economy and, closely related, the relative size and rigidity of the insider coalitions created through government intervention. Insiders and outsiders exist everywhere, but the divisions are particularly stark, immovable and consequential in the Arab world. They undermine the negotiation of a more equitable social contract between state, business and labour.

Dr Michael Willis' new book offers an explanation of this unexpected development known as the Hirak Movement, examining the political and social changes that have occurred in Algeria since the ‘dark decade’ of the 1990s When mass protests erupted in Algeria in 2019, on a scale unseen anywhere in the region since the Arab Spring, the outside world was taken by surprise. Algeria had been largely unaffected by the turmoil that engulfed its neighbours in 2011, and it was widely assumed that the population was too traumatised and cowed by the country’s bloody civil war of the 1990s to take to the streets demanding change. Algeria: Politics and Society from the Dark Decade to the Hirak offers an explanation of this unexpected development known as the Hirak Movement, examining the political and social changes that have occurred in Algeria since the ‘dark decade’ of the 1990s. It examines how the bitter civil conflict was brought to an end, and how a fresh political order was established following the 1999 election of a new leader, Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Initially underwritten by revenue from Algeria’s substantial hydrocarbons resources, this new order came to be undermined by falling oil prices, an ailing president, and a population determined to have its voice heard by an increasingly corrupt, out-of-touch and opaque national leadership. Dr Michael Willis is a Fellow of the Middle East Centre and St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford where he has taught modern Maghreb politics since 2004. Algeria: Politics and Society from the Dark Decade to the Hirak is his second book on Algeria. His first was The Islamist Challenge in Algeria; A Political History published in 1997. He is also the author of Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from Independence to the Arab Spring which came out in 2012. Guest Speaker: Dr Michael Willis (St Antony’s College, University of Oxford) Chair: Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony's College, University of Oxford)

A new theoretical framework for how democracy can emerge in the Middle East and wider Muslim world, where political conflicts over religion often predominate. Abstract: This talk focuses on the speaker's recently published book, Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave, 2022). It provides a new theoretical framework for how democracy can emerge in the Middle East and wider Muslim world, where political conflicts over religion often predominate. Its novel argument is that rather than resolving intractable theological debates about the role of Islam in politics and the public sphere, democratization hinges instead upon religious actors like Islamists and their secularist rivals to make pragmatic compromises that guarantee their mutual survival. Such pacting can usher in long-term accommodation, and lead to the institutionalization of democratic order. From there, theological shifts can occur, demonstrating that temporal politics can be the catalyst for renewed religious interpretations. Tuesday, 22 November 2022 - 5:00pm to 6:00pm Venue: Investcorp Lecture Theatre, St Antony's College Speaker(s): Hicham Alaoui Chair: Dr Michael Willis (St Antony's College) Biography: Hicham Alaoui is the founder and director of the Hicham Alaoui Foundation, which undertakes innovative social scientific research in the Middle East and North Africa. He is a scholar on the comparative politics of democratization and religion, with a focus on the MENA region. In the past, he served as a visiting scholar and Consulting Professor at the Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law at Stanford University. He more recently served as postdoctoral fellow and research associate at Harvard University. He was also Regents Lecturer at several campuses of the University of California system. Outside of academia, he has worked with the United Nations in various capacities, such as the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. He has also worked with the Carter Center in its overseas missions on conflict resolution and democracy advancement. He has served on the MENA Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch and the Advisory Board of the Carnegie Middle East Center. He served on the board of the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, and has recently joined the Advisory Board of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. He holds an A.B. from Princeton University, M.A. from Stanford University, and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. His academic research has been widely published in various French and English journals, magazines, and newspapers of record. His latest book is Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave, 2022). His memoirs, Journal d'un Prince Banni, was published in 2014 by Éditions Grasset, and has since been translated into several languages. He is co-author with Robert Springborg of The Political Economy of Arab Education (Lynne Rienner, 2021), and co-author with the same colleague on the forthcoming volume Security Assistance in the Middle East: Challenges and the Need for Change (Lynne Rienner, 2023).

A talk based on John McManus’s book, Inside Qatar: hidden stories from one of the richest nations on earth. A social anthropologist, McManus lifts a lid on the hidden worlds of Qatar’s gilded elite, its spin doctors and thrill seekers, its manual labourers and domestic workers. He attempts to go beyond the government PR and the negative headlines about its treatment of migrant workers to capture what life is really like in this nation of 3 million people, only 11 per cent of whom are Qatari citizens. Inside Qatar reveals how real people live in this surreal place, a land of both great opportunity and great iniquity. The sum of their tales is not some exotic cabinet of curiosities. Instead, Inside Qatar opens a window onto the global problems - of unfettered capitalism, growing inequality and climate change - that concern us all. Biography: John McManus is a social anthropologist whose research looks at sport, migration and multiculturalism in the Middle East, in particular Turkey and Qatar. He is the author of Inside Qatar: hidden stories from one of the richest nations on earth (Icon Books, 2022) and Welcome to Hell? In Search of the Real Turkish Football (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2018), the latter awarded runner-up in the 2019 British-Kuwaiti Friendship Society book prize. John holds a PhD in Social anthropology and MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford and is a former Postdoctoral Fellow at the British Institute at Ankara (2016-18). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post, Financial Times and the BBC, as well as academic journals.

Aaron Rock-Singer presents their latest book "In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the 20th-Century Middle East". Salafis explicitly base their legitimacy on continuity with the Quran and the Sunna, and their distinctive practices—praying in shoes, wearing long beards and short pants, and observing gender segregation—are understood to have a similarly ancient pedigree. In this talk, which is based on his new book In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the 20th Century Middle East,Aaron Rock-Singer argues that Salafism is a creation of the twentieth century and that its signature practices emerged primarily out of Salafis’ competition with other social movements amid the intellectual and social upheavals of modernity. In doing so, he moves beyond the surface claims of Salafism’s own proponents—and the academics who often reproduce them—into the larger sociocultural and intellectual forces that have shaped Islam’s fastest growing revivalist movement. A short biography of Dr Aaron Rock-Singer, Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison: Aaron Rock-Singer is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a research focus on 20th century Islamic movements and states. He received his BA at the University of Pennsylvania, his M.Phil at St. Anthony's College, Oxford and his Ph.D. at Princeton University. In his first book, Practicing Islam in Egypt: Print Media and Islamic Revival (Cambridge, 2019), he drew on ideologically diverse Islamic magazines from this period to chart the rise of an Islamic Revival in 1970s Egypt within a larger global story of religious contestation and change. He is currently an assistant professor in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ian Martin presents his latest book on Libya: All Necessary Measures? The United Nations and International Intervention in Libya. In the book, he asks and offer personal answers to these questions: Was the international intervention in Libya a justified response to an impending massacre and wider threat to civilians, or were other motivations involved in seeking to oust Gaddafi and shape the future of an oil-rich country? What were the dynamics that brought about the resolutions of the UN Security Council, including the authorization of military action? How did NATO act upon that authorization, and did it exceed its mandate to protect civilians by seeking regime change? What role in the military victory of the rebels was played by the secretive special forces operations of bilateral actors, and with what consequences? Was there ever a possibility of a peaceful political transition being brought about by the mediation efforts of the UN, the African Union (AU) or others? How well-informed, or how ignorant, were policymakers about Libya and the regional implications of their decisions? What post-conflict planning was undertaken by the UN and other international actors, and by the Libyans themselves, and how did it play out during the first transitional government? Should and could there have been a major peacekeeping or stabilization mission to provide security during the transition, instead of a “light footprint” of the international community? Was the first national election held too soon? Who should and could have done more to help bring the proliferation of armed groups under government authority, and achieve their integration into state security forces or demobilization? In answering each of these questions, he offers his own reflections on the views held at the time and his reassessment today. Ian Martin has headed United Nations field missions in several countries, including as Special Representative of the Secretary-General and head of the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) 2011-12; Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Nepal 2005-09; and Special Representative of the Secretary-General for the East Timor Popular Consultation 1999. He served as a member of the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations appointed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, which reported in June 2015. His other senior UN appointments include Head of the Headquarters Board of Inquiry into certain incidents in the Gaza Strip; Special Envoy for Timor-Leste; Representative in Nepal of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General in the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea; Chief of the UN Human Rights Field Operation in Rwanda; and Director for Human Rights of the UN/Organization of American States International Civilian Mission in Haiti. He also served in the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina as Deputy High Representative for Human Rights. He was Secretary General of Amnesty International (1986-92), Vice President of the International Center for Transitional Justice (2002-05), and Executive Director of Security Council Report (2015-18). His writings include Self-Determination in East Timor: the United Nations, the Ballot, and International Intervention (2001) and All Necessary Measures? The United Nations and International Intervention in Libya (2022).

A vivid and authoritative account of the making of the modern Middle East, from the BBC’s long-serving correspondent in the region. Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International Editor (former Middle East Editor), has been covering the region since 1989 and is uniquely placed to explain its complex past and its troubled present. In this new book, in part based on his acclaimed podcast, Bowen takes us on a journey across the Middle East and through its history. He meets ordinary men and women on the front line, their leaders, whether brutal or benign, and he explores the power games that have so often wreaked devastation on civilian populations as those leaders, whatever their motives, jostle for political, religious and economic control. With his deep understanding of the political, cultural and religious differences between countries as diverse as Erdogan's Turkey, Assad's Syria and Netanyahu's Israel and his long experience of covering events in the region, Bowen offers readers a gripping and invaluable guide to the modern Middle East, how it came to be and what its future might hold.

Join us for Booktalk Episode 9, Professor Deborah Starr (Cornell University) in conversation about her new book, Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema, published by California Press. Professor Walter Armbrust (St Antony's College, Oxford) chairs the discussion. Extract from publisher’s website: In this book, Deborah Starr recuperates the work of Togo Mizrahi, a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Mizrahi, an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, established himself as a prolific director of popular comedies and musicals in the 1930s and 1940s. As a studio owner and producer, Mizrahi promoted the idea that developing a local cinema industry was a project of national importance. Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema integrates film analysis with film history to tease out the cultural and political implications of Mizrahi’s work. His movies, Starr argues, subvert dominant notions of race, gender, and nationality through their playful—and queer—use of masquerade and mistaken identity. Taken together, Mizrahi’s films offer a hopeful vision of a pluralist Egypt. By re-evaluating Mizrahi’s contributions to Egyptian culture, Starr challenges readers to reconsider the debates over who is Egyptian and what constitutes national cinema. Deborah Starr is a professor of Near Eastern Studies and director of the Jewish Studies Program at Cornell University. She writes and teaches about issues of identity and inter-communal exchange in Middle Eastern literature and film, with a focus on the Jews of Egypt. She is the author of Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Literature, Culture, and Empire (Routledge 2009), and co-editor with Sasson Somekh of Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff. Her new book Togo Mizrahi and The Making of Egyptian Cinema (University of California Press, 2020) recuperates the work of a Jewish a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Starr has also published articles in a variety of journals on cosmopolitanism and levantinism in modern Arabic and Hebrew literature and Egyptian cinema Professor Walter Armbrust is a Hourani Fellow and Professor in Modern Middle Eastern Studies. He is a cultural anthropologist, and author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (1996); Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution (2019); and various other works focusing on popular culture, politics and mass media in Egypt. He is editor of Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond (2000). Join us for our MEC live webinars – registration essential; details available from Middle East Centre Events, St Antony's College or subscribe to our weekly e-mailing newsletter by emailing [email protected] and follow us on Twitter @OxfordMEC Speakers: Professor Deborah Starr (Cornell University) Chair: Professor Walter Armbrust (St Antony’s College, Oxford)