Middle East Centre Booktalk Oxford University

Book Launch for "The Damascus Events: the 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World" By Eugene Rogan, Published in hardback by Allen Lane, 2 May 2024. A watershed moment in the history and the making of the modern Middle East. Renowned Arab scholar, Eugene Rogan brilliantly recreates the lost world of the Middle East under Ottoman rule at a formative juncture that was to reshape the future of the region to the present day. The old Empire was under pressure from global economic change and European imperial expansion and tensions were raised – nowhere more so than in Damascus. LInked by caravan trade to Baghdad, the Mediterranean and Mecca, Damascus was a warily tolerant place until local diplomatic and trade reforms consistently favoured Christians over Arab Muslims, who came to see their Christian neighbours as an existential threat, such that the extermination of the Syrian Christians seemed like a reasonable solution.

The unprecedented violence that followed shocked the world, claiming more than 10k Christians in Mount Lebanon and 5k in Damascus. For Syria, Lebanon and the Arab states it remains a defining moment.

It would take a generation for the Ottoman government to rebuild the city and restore peace between the Muslims and Christians of Damascus, introducing far reaching administrative and financial reforms which would return stability not only to the Syrian capital but also shape the future of the newly emerging countries of the modern Middle East. That peace in Damascus would last 150 years, until the outbreak of civil war in 2011.

Eugene Rogan has been mulling over the pivotal importance of this massacre all his professional life. Drawing on the never-before-seen first hand reports of Dr Mishaqa, the Christian vice-Consul to the US, and other notable scholars of the time, he answers key questions: why did the Muslim of Damascus massacre the Christians of their city? and How did the Ottoman authorities bring the city back from that brink? He brings essential new material to the history of the moment, while building the most comprehensive survey to date of eye witness accounts from both the Christian and Muslim perspectives.

The Damascus Events offers a superb history of a moment of deeply divisive trauma that unmade a great city and examines the possibility, even after conflict and tragedy, of renewal.

Professor Ardi Imseis new book explores the UN’s management of the longest-running problem on its agenda, critically assessing tensions between the Organisation’s position and international law. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there has been a continuing though vacillating gulf between the requirements of international law and the United Nations (UN) on the question of Palestine.
What forms has the UN’s failure to respect international law taken, and with what implications? The author critically interrogates the received wisdom regarding the UN’s fealty to the international rule of law, in favour of what is described as an international rule by law. This book demonstrates that through the actions of the UN, Palestine and its people have been committed to a state of what the author calls ‘international legal subalternity’, according to which the promise of justice through international law is repeatedly proffered under a cloak of political legitimacy furnished by the international community, but its realization is interminably withheld. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

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). Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

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. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

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)


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