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: Taawon UK

Israel's assault on Gaza has resulted in the destruction of every university in Gaza. Over 90,000 students have lost access to higher education. And yet, despite the devastation, Palestinians in Gaza are trying to continue their studies. If you are a student, academic, or someone who wants to know more about how we can help support the education sector in Gaza, we hope you will join us for a live recording of the first Taawon Talks to be held in the UK.

Zahira Jaser and Kholoud Abuhjayyer will be sitting down for a conversation and Q&A on academic solidarity in the UK for Palestine. They will be discussing subjects such as:

• How have students in Gaza been able to continue learning under bombardment?
• What can academics in the UK do to support Palestinian higher education?
• How are scholarships changing the lives of students and communities?

We will have multiple opportunities for you to ask our expert speakers your questions and shape the conversation.

Organiser: Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Research Seminar Series

How do exiled communities sustain and reimagine the idea of the nation?

This lecture delves into the vital yet often overlooked cultural and intellectual labour of Palestinian women in the Western diaspora. Moving beyond conventional narratives of victimhood or passivity, it explores how these women act as central architects of diasporic nationhood, navigating the intersecting challenges of migration, legal status, and hybrid identities.

Drawing from an interdisciplinary digital humanities project, the lecture examines a vibrant archive of literary works, films, arts, and digital activism. It investigates how creators leverage cultural tools to preserve collective memory, assert political identity, and forge transnational solidarities. Crucially, we will explore how cultural productions become contested spaces where feminist praxis meets national imagination, allowing for the subversion of both orientalist and patriarchal narratives.

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

Few countries have had as vexed a political history as Syria. Carved out of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War, Syria was then brutally ruled by France. This French ‘mandate’ carved out new borders with equally provisional neighbours in a process that pulled apart families, trade networks and political assumptions that had already been ravaged by the war.

Syria’s subsequent history has been a series of attempts to make sense of its borders, including a failed attempt in the late 1950s to unite with Egypt and several humiliations at the hands of Israel’s armed forces. The civil war that broke out in 2011 plunged Syria into a nightmarish series of disasters, including the terrible years of Islamic State, ultimately resulting in the reimposition of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship, which came to an end in 2024.

Daniel Neep’s remarkable book creates a gripping, intelligent narrative of how Syrians have lived through these events, never losing sight either of the fates of ordinary people or of Syria’s rich, complex and diverse society, unwillingly or willingly brought together in such a highly contested space.

Organiser: Contemporary Turkish Studies at LSE and the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA)

This panel features a conversation between two scholars on the past, present, and future of water infrastructure, policy, and scarcity in Türkiye, exploring these issues through the contested idea of a national ‘hydraulic mission.’

Organised around the question of whether a national ‘hydraulic mission’ can be considered complete, the panel reflects on how water infrastructure and policy have shaped state priorities, social relations, and environmental outcomes over time.

Organiser: Centre for the Study of Islam, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter

Speaker: Andrew Marsham (Professor of Classical Arabic Studies, University of Cambridge)

The tumultuous era of Umayyad rule in the 7th- and 8th-century Mediterranean and Middle East was a crucial formative moment for the religious and cultural traditions of Islam and for Arab ethnic identity. In this talk, Andrew Marsham reflects on three perspectives on the Umayyad era that he gained from researching and writing his recent book: first, the importance that the Late Antique Little Ice Age and the Justinianic Plague had as contexts for the formation and development of the new empire; second the distinctive combinations of settled and pastoralist resources which were brought together in the formation of the new imperial elite; and third, the distinctive consequences that this combination had for the evolution of Islamic and Arab identities in the Umayyad era.

Organiser: Department of International Relations, LSE

In this book launch event, Paul Dixon will present his new book, The Militarisation of British Democracy: The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and the Rise of Authoritarianism (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) followed by a panel discussion about the key questions. Dixon explores how senior military leaders, not just politicians, played a decisive role in driving Britain into the Iraq and Afghan wars; arguing that the pursuit of war and the further militarisation of British democracy since 9/11 has made the nation particularly prone to military aggression. The book highlights the emergence of what Dixon describes as a “militarist coalition” – a network of military leaders, political allies, civil servants, media figures and cultural institutions that promoted militarist values and normalised the idea of permanent war. Alongside analysis of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the event will raise wider questions about democratic control of the military and the use of fear to rally support for increased military spending and further wars with Russia and China.

Organiser: The Edinburgh Alwaleed Centre

Join us on 12 February when Dr Ken Chitwood, (Universität Bayreuth and the University of Southern California), discusses his new book 'Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism Among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam' (University of Texas Press 2025). Drawing on years of ethnographic research and more than a hundred interviews conducted in Puerto Rico, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, and online, Ken Chitwood tells the story of Puerto Rican Muslims as they construct a shared sense of peoplehood through everyday practices. 

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

This talk explores how and why Saudi Arabia burst onto the landscape of world football in 2023 and examines what the speed and scale of Saudi engagement, as investor, owner, sponsor, host, and participant, means for the Kingdom and for football more broadly. Analysis will place Saudi Arabia’s startling emergence as one of the hubs in world football in the 2020s in historical and comparative perspective, set against previous periods of Saudi investment in football, in the 1970s, and attempts elsewhere to rapidly kickstart the domestic game, in the United States, Japan, and China. Going beyond labels such as ‘sportswashing,’ which have gained media currency in recent years, Kingdom of Football examines what drives Saudi policymaking and connects the move into football with domestic economic and social developments and external and foreign policy considerations. The talk also examines how the Saudi foray into football builds upon but differs from the approaches taken by other Gulf States, such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, and assesses the factors that will determine the sustainability and durability of the Kingdom’s engagement with football in the decade-long runup to the 2034 World Cup.

Organiser: SOAS University of London and Banipal Trust

Join us for a keynote lecture by Boyd Tonkin, reflecting on the past quarter‑century of literary translation in a talk titled “Republic of letters or global bazaar: literary translation in the new millennium.” Following the lecture, the 20th‑year Saif Ghobash Banipal prize winner Marilyn Booth will discuss her acclaimed translation of Honey Hunger.

Organiser: LSE Middle East Centre

Join the LSE Middle East Centre for PeaceRep Iraq's final conference 'Reframing Iraq: Power, Politics, and Paths to Inclusion'. This conference marks the conclusion of the PeaceRep Iraq research programme and presents five years of field-based research on governance, power, and political transformation in post-2003 Iraq.

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. 

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: 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.

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: 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: 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

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.