MENA-related Events Calendar

London Palestine Film Festival (@lpffofficial) returns Nov 13th–27th. This year's programme features UK premieres, Oscar-nominated titles, archival footage and retrospective screenings, creating a vital space to showcase the richness and complexities of Palestinian life. Including Muayad Alayan’s newly released Conversation with the Sea, and don’t miss our screening in tribute to Mohammed Bakri +Q&A at Rio Cinema and Riverside Studios. Check out the full programme and book your tickets now to explore Palestinian culture and resistance through cinema. 

Join Caabu for an in-person book launch with Eamonn Gearon, who will be discussing his book, The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain's Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit, on British intelligence organisation operating in the Middle East during the First World War.

To RSVP, please email Joseph Willits (willitsj@caabu.org). The book can be purchased here.

When: Monday 16 November 2026, 18:00.

Where: Boardroom, The Arab British Centre, 1 Gough Square, London, EC4A 3DE. How to find us here.

The Arab Bureau is not another book about Lawrence of Arabia. Rather, it is a ground-breaking study offers a comprehensive reassessment of a pivotal yet often misunderstood British intelligence organisation operating in the Middle East during the First World War. Drawing on extensive archival research and newly discovered materials, it moves beyond popular Lawrence narratives to examine the Arab Bureau’s collective innovations in intelligence-gathering and propaganda. Among the most significant of these discoveries is a 200-page Arabic-language text, the longest piece of British-sponsored propaganda from any theatre of the war, which Gearon has translated into English for the first time.

But the Arab Bureau’s story does not end with its disbanding, in 1920. Eamonn distils his findings into seven novel yet enduring principles – his Seven Pillars of Intelligence Wisdom – which demonstrate how lessons the Arab Bureau developed for operating across cultural and linguistic divides remain as relevant to intelligence and policy communities today as they were a century ago.

Organiser: SOAS Middle East Institute

Speakers: Madawi Al-Rasheed (Fellow of the British Academy); Maryam Aldossari (Associate Professor in Organisation Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London)

Chair: Adam Hanieh (Director, SOAS Middle East Institute)

The Quest for Democracy in Saudi Arabia brings together scholars and activists to examine the possibilities and challenges of democratic change in Saudi Arabia.

The book challenges the idea that demands for political participation, accountability and rights are somehow absent from Saudi society, and instead places these struggles within their longer political, social and historical context.

The launch will provide an opportunity to reflect on these questions at a particularly important moment: what democracy might mean in the Saudi context, the forces that continue to constrain political change, and the role of social movements, women, activists and wider civil society in imagining and pushing for different political futures.