King's College London Middle East & North Africa Podcast King's College London Department of Middle Eastern Studies

This book launch highlighted the economic, social and political rise of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) as well as its political resilience over the last sixteen years.

Speaker - Sevinc Bermek

Sevinc is a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies and a teaching fellow at the department of International Development at King’s College London.

She is also part-time teaching fellow at the department of Government at London School of Economics. She completed her PhD in political and social studies at the University of Warwick in 2013

Professor Laleh Khalili reflects on the lives and bodies of modern seafarers in the western Indian Ocean.

This panel examines the consequences of surrogate warfare for local conflicts in the Middle East, looking at how Iran, Arab Gulf states and the United States externalize the burden of conflicts to surrogates. What drives surrogate warfare in the region, what can patrons really achieve and what are the long-term effects trained, equipped and empowered in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere?

Speakers:

Dr. Andreas Krieg is an assistant professor at the School of Security at King’s College London currently seconded to the Royal College of Defence Studies. In his research Andreas has combined his regional expertise of the Middle East with the wider field of Security Studies. He has looked at violent non-state actors and unconventional means of warfare in the twenty-first century. As an expert for Middle East security more generally and Gulf security in particular, Andreas has employed his regional and subject-related expertise providing strategic and operational risk consultancy to a variety of commercial and governmental organizations operating in the MENA region. He most recently published a book with Georgetown University Press titled ‘Surrogate Warfare – The Transformation of War in the 21st Century’.

Anas El Gomati is the founder and current Director General of the Tripoli-based Sadeq Institute, the first public policy think tank in Libya’s history established in August 2011. Anas is also the research director for the security & governance programme at the institute. He has held several positions across the Middle East and Europe, as a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut, Lebanon and visiting lecturer at the NATO Defence College in Rome, Italy. He is a frequent commentator on Libya & the MENA region in the media. His research focuses are primarily on the security sector, foreign policy, and violent extremism

Michael Stephens is the Research Fellow for Middle East Studies and Head of RUSI Qatar. From March to June 2017 Michael was seconded into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, serving as the Senior Research Analyst for Syria and Lebanon. His research has recently focused on Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Kurdish regions of Syria, as well as UK national security policy in the Middle East.

Listen to Dr Camelia Suleiman discuss how the Arabic language became a site of struggle over legitimacy, silencing and exclusion of the Palestinian citizens of Israel who constitute roughly 20% of Israel’s population.

This is a recording of the IMES Inaugural Conference titled 'The Media, Politics and Dissent in North Africa Since the Arab Spring' which took place on 25 September 2019.

00:00 Introductions: Fatima El-Issawi and Jonathan Hill

13:30
Panel #1: The media and authoritarian resilience
Chair: Jonathan Hill
Speakers:
(1) Francesco Cavatorta;
(2) Kjetil Selvick;
(3) Hendrick Kraetzschmar.

1:23:45
Panel #2: The media and political accountability since the Arab Spring
Chair: Dina Mattar
Speakers:
(1) Roxane Farmanfarmaian;
(2) Boubaker Jamaei;
(3) Fatima el-Issawi.

2:50:50
Panel #3: New medias, new dissent?
Chair: Charis Boutieri
Speakers:
(1) Christina Moreno-Almeida;
(2) Chaima Bouhel;
(3) Omar Radi.

4:24:20
Closing address: Omar Belhouchet

A public lecture delivered by Dr Nimer Sultany (School of Law, SOAS) at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, King's College London on 30 January 2018.

What is the effect of revolutions on legal systems? What role do constitutions play in legitimating regimes? How do constitutions and revolutions converge or clash? This talk address these and other constitutional questions about the Arab Uprisings by drawing on the findings in the speaker's recently published book. The book, Law and Revolution: Legitimacy and Constitutionalism After the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2017), urges a rethinking of major categories in political, legal, and constitutional theory in light of the Arab Spring. It offers a novel and comprehensive examination of the constitutional order that preceded and followed the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Jordan, Algeria, Oman, and Bahrain. It also provides the first thorough discussion of the trials of former regime officials in Egypt and Tunisia. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, including an in-depth analysis of recent court rulings in several Arab countries, the book illustrates the contradictory roles of law and constitutions. It also contrasts the Arab Spring with other revolutionary situations and demonstrates how the Arab Spring provides a laboratory for examining scholarly ideas about revolutions, legitimacy, legality, continuity, popular sovereignty, and constituent power.

The book is a novel and comprehensive examination of the constitutional order that preceded and followed the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Jordan, Algeria, Oman and Bahrain: http://bit.ly/2AAeSf8

NIMER SULTANY is Senior Lecturer in Public Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He holds a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Harvard Law School, and was the recipient of the British Academy Fellowship. His book “Law and Revolution: Legitimacy and Constitutionalism After the Arab Spring” was published by Oxford University Press. He also published extensively on constitutional theory, Islamic constitutionalism, and Israeli jurisprudence.