LSE Middle East Centre Podcasts
Welcome to the LSE Middle East Centre's podcast feed. The MEC builds on LSE's long engagement with the Middle East and North Africa and provides a central hub for the wide range of research on the region carried out at LSE. Follow us and keep up to date with our latest event podcasts and interviews!
Episodes
September 8, 2025 • 42 mins
This event was the launch of 'Paths Made by Walking: The Work of Howzevi Women in Iran' by Amina Tawasil.
This groundbreaking ethnography on Iranian howzevi (seminarian) women reveals how ideologies of womanhood, institutions, and Islamic practices have played a pivotal role in religiously conservative women's mobility in the Middle East.
This event was co-organised with the Department of Anthropology at LSE.
Meet the speaker a...
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September 4, 2025 • 85 mins
This keynote lecture delivered by Professor Hamit Bozarslan took place during the Kurdish Studies Conference organised by the LSE Middle East Centre and the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield.
An expert in the Middle East, Turkey and the Kurdish question, Hamit Bozarslan has been director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris since 2006. A doc...
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July 22, 2025 • 67 mins
This talk delivered by Professor René Provost explored important lessons on the promises and limits of non-state justice in conflict zones, specifically looking at the Kurdish-dominated Democratic Autonomous Administration of North East Syria.
Zones of armed conflict are spaces of disorder, which state and non-state belligerents alike aim to curtail through law. Starting in 2014, the Kurdish-dominated Democratic Autonomous Adminis...
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July 10, 2025 • 53 mins
This event celebrated the work of Professor Charles Tripp through a new edited volume by Toby Dodge, Daniel Neep and Ali Ansari.
The work of Charles Tripp – professor at SOAS University of London for over three decades – has shaped a distinct approach to the study of Middle East politics: an analytical sensibility that is empirically rich, theoretically insightful, and historically sensitive. This edited volume brings together con...
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What does Yemen’s political, economic and social history and experience tell us about what is realistic for the coming decade and beyond? This keynote lecture delivered by writer and researcher Helen Lackner discussed the main socio-political transformations since the 1960s, and addressed the most relevant features for the country's future. Lackner's presentation drew on her personal experience in different sectors throughout the c...
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May 20, 2025 • 35 mins
This event was the launch of Seçkin Sertdemir's latest book 'Civic Death in Contemporary Turkey: Mass Surveillance and the Authoritarian State' published by Cambridge University Press.
What does it mean for a government to declare its citizens 'dead' while they still live? Following the failed 2016 coup, the Turkish AKP government implemented sweeping powers against some 152,000 of its citizens. These Kanun hükmünde kararnameli (...
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April 15, 2025 • 73 mins
This event, co-organised with the Department of International Development at LSE, was a discussion with Professor Naila Kabeer and Professor Ragui Assaad based on their co-authored report 'Women's Access to Market Opportunities in South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa: Barriers, Opportunities and Policy Challenges'.
Despite this paper being written in 2019, the situation of women's access to market opportunities in MENA...
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March 24, 2025 • 62 mins
This event disseminated the findings of a series of papers produced for the LSE Middle East Centre by Ahmed Tabaqchali exploring the economic and financial interactions of the Iraqi economy with the outside world, particularly the use of the dollar in relation to Iran and the US.
While the US’ Iraq policy is still fluid, there have been signs that America’s ‘maximum pressure campaign’ towards Iran will have spillover effects in I...
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March 20, 2025 • 55 mins
This event was the launch of Dr Anne Kirstine Rønn's latest paper as part of the LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series on 'The Struggles of Labour Mobilisation in Lebanon and Iraq'.
Despite facing significant challenges, including elite control and repression, labour movements in both Lebanon and Iraq have sought to assert their independence and challenge the status quo. This paper explores the main types of labour organisations in...
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February 23, 2025 • 86 mins
The return of Donald Trump to the White House in 2025 comes on the back of extreme violence in the Middle East, led by Israel and with great financial and political investment from the United States. What impact will Trump's second term have on the Middle East region, and what can we learn from his policies in his first term as President of the United States?
Between 2017- 2021 several major policies helped alter regional dynamic...
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February 18, 2025 • 78 mins
This event was the launch of Dr Marouf Cabi's latest book 'Iranian Kurdistan Under the Islamic Republic: Change, Revolution, and Resistance' published by I.B. Tauris.
Cabi presents a social, political, cultural, and socioeconomic history of Iranian Kurdistan since the 1979 Revolution. In this study, Marouf Cabi shines a spotlight on the modern history of Iranian Kurdistan – an area of Greater Kurdistan understudied in comparison ...
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January 30, 2025 • 87 mins
This event was the launch of Jerome Drevon's latest book 'From Jihad to Politics: How Syrian Jihadis Embraced Politics' published by Oxford University Press.
Drevon's timely book offers an examination of the Syrian armed opposition, tracing the emergence of Jihadi groups in the conflict, their dominance, and their political transformation.
Meet our speakers
Jerome Drevon is Senior Analyst on Jihad and Modern Conflict at Interna...
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January 19, 2025 • 72 mins
This event was the launch of Dr Sana Murrani's latest book 'Rupturing Architecture: Spatial Practices of Refuge in Response to War and Violence in Iraq, 2003–2023' published by Bloomsbury.
Written by an Iraqi architect who has lived through the trauma of several wars, 10 years of UN-imposed sanctions, an invasion, and the subsequent violence, this book captures a broad spectrum of spatial responses to trauma and presents a fresh p...
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December 16, 2024 • 63 mins
This event, as part of the LSE Middle East Centre's Kurdish Studies Series, discussed the online exhibition and research project 'Bridging Identities: The Cultural Odyssey of Kurdistani Jews' exploring the identity and heritage of Kurdistani Jews.
The stories in this research project shed light on this community's past through the lens of their memories and nostalgic ties to the homeland they left behind as they migrated to Israel...
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December 3, 2024 • 84 mins
This event brought together academics and healthcare professionals to shed light on the healthcare crisis in Sudan.
With more than 70% of Sudan’s healthcare facilities currently non-functional according to the International Rescue Committee, speakers will discuss the challenges of delivering care during this increasingly protracted conflict, with insights from research and experience. The event will provide an opportunity to share...
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December 3, 2024 • 84 mins
This event was a conversation around the special issue 'The Academic Question of Palestine' published by the journal Middle East Critique. This issue was guest-edited by Walaa Alqaisiya and Nicola Perugini.
Drawing on the various contributions of the special issue, speakers discussed the sense of intellectual and political emergency that has triggered the need for this project—the emergency produced by thousands of instances of re...
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November 24, 2024 • 99 mins
This event was the launch of 'Making Sense of the Arab State' edited by Steven Heydemann & Marc Lynch, and published by University of Michigan Press.
No region in the world has been more hostile to democracy, more dominated by military and security institutions, or weaker on economic development and inclusive governance than the Middle East. Why have Arab states been so oppressively strong in some areas but so devastatingly weak i...
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November 19, 2024 • 81 mins
This event, organised by the LSE Middle East Centre and the Department of International Relations, LSE was a discussion around the book 'How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare' by Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani and Ali Vaez published by Stanford University Press.
Sanctions have enormous consequences. Especially when imposed by a country with the economic influence of the United States, sanc...
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November 17, 2024 • 63 mins
In this talk, Dr Olivia Mason traced the history of Jordan's nature reserves in the British archives, exploring how nature reserves bring global and situated resource narratives into conversation, how they continue imperial spatial imaginations after periods of administrative colonialism, and the connections between conservation agendas and imperial geopolitical alliances.
Meet the speakers
Olivia Mason is a Lecturer in the schoo...
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October 20, 2024 • 93 mins
With Israel’s assault on Lebanon increasing and its war on Gaza continuing without a diplomatic resolution in sight, the Israeli government is involved in a multi-front conflict across the Middle East.
This panel discussion brought together academics and political analysts to discuss the growing regional ramifications of the conflict. How have regional and international responses to the latest Israeli assault on Gaza since Octobe...
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