MENA-related Events Calendar

Organiser: Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Research Seminar Series

The ongoing devastation in Gaza and other parts of Palestine, alongside the systematic destruction of Palestinian universities, has coincided with intensified censorship and repression within Western academic institutions.These developments reveal the distinctive position that Zionism and its defense has held for decades within Western imperial structures, creating patterns of epistemic injustice. 'Palestine and the Western Academe' emerges from a collective sense of political and intellectual urgency in response to mounting repression against scholars and students working on and studying Palestine. While attacks on academic freedom and freedom of speech in Western academia have intensified, they have been met with new forms of resistance and disobedience, bolstered by coalitional anti-racist and anti-capitalist solidarities extending from Palestine globally.

'Palestine and Western Academe' brings together significant contributions from scholars and students offering fresh approaches to the epistemic and political struggles surrounding Palestine. It demonstrates the timely and enduring relevance of the Palestinian question to international academic spaces and is essential reading for academics, researchers, and students interested in Middle Eastern Studies, Political Science, International Relations, Critical Theory, Decolonial Studies, and Academic Freedom discourse.

Organiser: Council for Arab-British Understanding (Caabu)

Join Caabu for this important discussion looking at the question of Britain's complicity with Israel's destruction of Gaza. Caabu Director, Chris Doyle will discuss this vital topic with leading author and journalist, Peter Oborne at a time when Israel continues its attacks on Gaza and restrictions on life-saving aid. The event will also be live-streamed on Caabu's YouTube channel which you can also subscribe to. 

Organiser: The Edinburgh Alwaleed Centre

2026 sees the world's two largest religious communities, the Christian and the Muslim, begin their periods of fasting, respectively Lent and Ramadan, on the same date, Wednesday 18th February. 

In order to mark this coincidence, Faiths United and the Chaplaincy in the University of Edinburgh, with the support of the Edinburgh Interfaith Association (EIFA) and the Alwaleed Centre in the University of Edinburgh, are very pleased to have been able to arrange this session on the place of fasting in the two communities, with Professor Hugh Goddard (Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Alwaleed Centre in the University of Edinburgh) and Shaykh Amin Buxton (Muslim Chaplain at the University of Edinburgh). 

Organiser: Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, University of Oxford

In 1950-51, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) conducted a census to register those who had lost their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 war in Palestine –known in Arabic as al-Nakba, the catastrophe. The registration records from this census constituted the backbone of UNRWA’s operations at that time and the foundation on which registration records of subsequent generations of refugees have been built. However, they have so far never been thoroughly analysed. For 75 years, the original census cards remained archived in UNRWA field offices in Gaza City, East Jerusalem, Amman, Damascus and Beirut. Their scanning was completed only at the end of 2025, following the rescue of the Gaza City archive after the outbreak of hostilities in October 2023 and the transfer of the East Jerusalem archive to Amman due to the Israeli Parliament’s bills banning UNRWA in October 2024. The digitisation of the registration records contained in these cards is now underway through a semi-automated workflow with human-in-the-loop oversight. Once finalised, this project will make it possible to identify all refugees who were registered by the census and attest their place of origin in pre-1948 Palestine. It will also provide an evidentiary basis for reconstructing family lineages and substantiating the historical claims of the current Palestine refugee population.

Organiser: LSE Middle East Centre and LSE Health

Join the LSE Middle East Centre and LSE Health for a lecture exploring recent health care reforms across the Middle East, with a particular focus on developments in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. 

The lecture examines the various economic, institutional, and political factors that are driving these approaches to health system reform drawing on work by the Partnership for Health System Sustainability and Resilience (www.phssr.org) of which the LSE is a founding partner, and will consider what these mean for health outcomes. The lecture will also reflect on what these developments can reveal about the future direction of health policy in other parts of the Middle East.

Organiser: Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, University of Oxford

At a time of widespread instability in the Middle East, this book reflects on the construction and contestation of order across the region. Combining conceptual reflections with contemporary empirical analysis, the book offers a timely account of how competing visions of order play out and shape the Middle East. The book seeks to offer a discussion of the concept of order that is grounded in International Relations approaches but applied to the Middle East using a range of important case studies. Bringing together established scholars and exciting new voices, this collection is essential reading in understanding the shifting contours of the Middle East

Organiser: LSE Middle East Centre

Join the LSE Middle East Centre for a panel discussion analysing and deconstructing notions of the family in the Middle East through a queer lens. 

By bringing together academics and journalists that utilise gender and media studies, as well as history and international relations, this interdisciplinary panel will speak to the relationship between the family and nation-building, the role of media and advertising in representing the mother figure, and through real life stories explore how people in the Middle East and the diaspora have redefined what family looks like.

Organiser: Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, University of Oxford

Both a love story and a coming-of-age tale that spans countries and continents, ‘Fire in Every Direction’ balances humour and loss, nostalgia and hope, as it takes us from the Middle East to London, and from 1948 to the present. Tareq Baconi crafts a deeply intimate, unforgettable portrait of how a political consciousness – desire and resistance – is passed down through generations

Organiser: School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh

Dr İdil Akıncı-Pérez explores how multigenerational migrant families in the Gulf are reimagining ageing, retirement, and long-term security.

Organiser: Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, University of Oxford

The assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri in a massive car bomb in Beirut on Valentine’s Day 2005 sends shockwaves through the Middle East. With a rolodex of international contacts, the murder of this billionaire-turned-statesman known as ‘Mr Lebanon’ triggers a massive investigation. But the terrorists behind his murder have done everything to hide their tracks. With all the twists of a dark conspiracy thriller, this feature documentary follows the complex investigation to track down his killers. 

Organiser: The Edinburgh Alwaleed Centre

Join us on 3 March when Dr Ugo Gaudino, ESRC Research Fellow (International Relations) at the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, presents and discusses his new book 'Islamophobia and Translations of Securitization in the UK, France, and Italy'. 

Islamophobia and Translations of Securitization in the UK, France, and Italy develops an alternative framework for studying Islamophobia and the securitization of Muslims. Gaudino integrates cross-disciplinary resources to investigate how and why European Muslims are often portrayed as a security threat by both right and left-wing political parties, exploring research on Islamophobia in the West, critical studies on security and terrorism, and scholarship on the normalization of far-right racism across the political spectrum.

3-8 March 2026

SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA is a new interactive multimedia performance taking place this March at Hoxton Hall, presented by the intercultural theatre company Border Crossings.

Developed through a month-long collaboration with Syrian women living in Turkey, the performance centres first-hand accounts of displacement — many spoken for the first time. These voices are placed in dialogue with live performance, music, movement and poetry, creating a contemporary reimagining of The Suppliants, Aeschylus’ 2,500-year-old play about asylum and democracy.

At the heart of each night is a structured audience debate, inviting collective reflection on how democratic societies respond to those seeking refuge today.

The event is framed by visual art from artists with lived experience of displacement, alongside live music from local choirs and Syrian musicians.

Border Crossings is an acclaimed intercultural theatre company, working across borders of culture, geography and language for over three decades.

Organiser: The Invisible East programme, Oxford Lifelong Learning, University of Oxford

A discussion on new approaches and trends in Islamic history through Persian sources, with expert panel to include:

• Arezou Azad, Programme Director of Invisible East
• Edmund Herzig, Masoumeh and Fereydoon Soudavar Professor of Persian Studies
• Yasmin Khan, Professor of Modern History
• Zuzanna Olszewska, Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of the Middle East

Tuesday 3 March, 5.30pm. Oxford Lifelong Learning, Wellington Square.

Drinks and conversation to follow. Tickets free – registration essential.

Organiser: Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Research Seminar Series

Join us for a hybrid seminar by Professor Anastasia Valassopoulos (University of Manchester) and Dr Ruth Abou Rached (University of Manchester), who will, respectively, give presentations on the visual culture of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and hi/stories of Palestine as future memory.

Organiser: Department of Gender Studies and Middle East Centre, LSE

This event explores how gender, culture, literature, and practices of writing both shape - and are shaped by - Kurdish lifeworlds.

The invited speakers approach these themes from diverse perspectives: some adopt a contemporary political lens, while others draw on archival research. Together, their contributions will spark conversations about the role of culture, literature and writing in times of conflict.

You're invited to join a drinks reception after the event.

Organiser: Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Research Seminar Series

Palestinian singer, composer, and musicologist Reem Kelani will lead a performative lecture tracing a spatio-temporal mapping of dispossession and migration. With the lecture participants, Kelani will explore traditional Palestinian songs and their pivotal role as testaments of existence and trauma. 

This presentation is interactive, based on the compositional technique of call-and-response, realised through group singing with the participants. No prior musical experience is required — only a willingness to listen, sing, travel across time and history, and celebrate musical memory

Organiser: Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Research Seminar Series

Join us for a hybrid seminar by Rik Janssen and Reem Al-Sada, two IMES PhD candidates, who will respectively give presentations on foreign observations of Ottoman archery, and the proliferation of religious theological ideas across the Arabian Peninsula and Indian Ocean world.

Organiser: Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL

Join us at the Institute of Advanced Studies for the launch of Critical Conditions, the powerful debut memoir by Hadi Abdullah, newly translated into English by Alessandro Columbu. Written in the aftermath of revolution, war, and exile, Critical Conditions is both a personal account of survival and a profound meditation on witnessing, resistance, and the politics of memory. Blending the immediacy of frontline reporting with lyrical reflection, Abdullah’s memoir traces his transformation from a teaching assistant in Homs to one of the most recognisable media voices of the Syrian uprising. Through his lens, we encounter not only the brutal realities of conflict but also deep bonds of friendship, moments of joy, loss, and the enduring will to document

Organiser: LSE Middle East Centre and the Centre for Peace and Security, Coventry University

We warmly invite you to attend this British Academy Conference, Algeria: Historical Struggles and Imagined Utopias, at the London School of Economics on Thursday 28 – Friday 29 May 2026.

The important historical legacies of the Independence struggle and exciting recent developments in Algerian political, social, cultural and economic fields call for a public platform in the UK for scholars working on Algeria to share their research. Prioritising decolonising, feminist and other innovative approaches in order to learn from Algeria’s important revolutionary history, contemporary struggles and future imaginations, this conference encourages an intersectional and multidisciplinary approach.

We invite you to attend a two-day workshop critically examining decentralised, autonomist, and federalist modes of political organising in West Asia and North Africa. The workshop aims to be a space of interdisciplinary exploration of historical lineages, contemporary manifestations, and future possibilities of decentralised governance in (post)uprising and (post)revolutionary contexts.

The workshop is structured around three core themes:  

• Historiography and Genealogy: excavating and reassessing historical precedents of autonomist organising in the WANA region, challenging statist historiographies.  
• Political Theory and Philosophy: articulating the distinct political thought emerging from these movements, exploring concepts of democracy, ecology, gender, and pluralism.  
• Contemporary Praxis and Future Possibilities: critically evaluating the successes, limitations, and future prospects of existing and emergent autonomist projects.

The workshop will take place at the University of Glasgow on 22 and 23 July 2026 from 10:00 am to 6 pm. To allow the broadest possible participation, the workshop will be held in person and online via Zoom. If you would like to attend the workshop, please register by following this Eventbrite link. There is no conference fee.