Professor Avi Shlaim gives the George Antonius Memorial Lecture 2023, examining the Jewish exodus from Iraq in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and arguing the Zionist movement played an active part in the uprooting of Iraqi Jews. This annual lecture is also a launch for Avi Shlaim’s new book, 'Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew' which will be published by Oneworld on 8 June. The three worlds of the title are Baghdad to the age of 5, Ramat Gan, Israel, 10 to 15, and school in London, 15 to 18. The book uses a family history to tell the bigger story of the Jewish community in Iraq, its rich culture, its integration into Iraqi society, and its contribution to nation-building at various levels. The lecture revolves round the central concept of the Arab-Jew. It examines the circumstances surrounding the Jewish exodus from Iraq in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. It challenges the Zionist narrative which claims that antisemitism was the main driver of the exodus. It argues that the Zionist movement played an active part in the uprooting of Iraqi Jews, and it presents new evidence to support this argument. Avi Shlaim is an Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988); War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History (1995); The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000, updated edition 2014); Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (2007); and Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (2009). Speakers: Emeritus Professor Avi Shlaim, FBA (University of Oxford) Chair: Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony's College) Recorded Thursday, 15 June 2023 Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Memorial event for the late Mr Nemir Amin Kirdar (1936-2020). The Warden of St Antony’s, the Fellows of the Middle East Centre, Mrs Nada Kirdar, her daughters Rena and Serra, and friends and colleagues from Investcorp gathered in the presence of His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Bahrain in memory of the late Mr Nemir Amin Kirdar (1936-2020). This Friday 7th October 2023 memorial event took place in the Investcorp Lecture Theatre of the Middle East Centre, St Antony's College. The Investcorp Building is named in recognition of the global investment group, Investcorp's remarkable support for the construction of the building - Mr Nemir Kirdar is the founder of Investcorp. Professor Roger Goodman, the Warden of St Antony’s, chaired the session with tributes from Mr Mohammed Alardhi, CEO of Investcorp, Professor Margaret MacMillan, former warden of St Antony’s, Professor Eugene Rogan, Director of the Middle East Centre, Mr Yusef Abu Khadra, a personal friend of Nemir Kirdar, Dr Serra Kirdar, Nemir and Nada’s daughter. The final speaker was His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Bahrain. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Prof. Esther Hertzog gives a talk on the vulnerable situation of motherhood in the Israeli welfare state. This talk will examine the role of state authorities, especially the welfare system and the courts, in undermining disadvantaged women's motherhood. State authorities undermine mothers' custodial rights over their offspring, especially through the discourse on 'child's wellbeing' and 'parental capability', blaming mothers for physically endangering and neglecting their children. It will be argued that while the formal discourse emphasizes the value of biological motherhood, yet in practice underprivileged mothers' custody over their offspring can be easily expropriated. Single parent mothers are a susceptible group from which babies can be taken away to adoption and their children taken to welfare institutions. The research on 'single parent mothers' ignores the phenomenon of expropriating disadvantaged mothers' parenthood by State authorities as well as the coercive means that are employed in the process. This talk will propose a critical analysis of the connection between "children at risk" discourse and disadvantaged women's motherhood.

Helen Lackner speaks about Yemen’s enduring crisis. Helen Lackner updates the seminar on the Yemeni war, providing a brief analysis of the origins of the conflict and addressing the main constraints and perspectives for the future. While focusing on the domestic aspects of the situation, she puts them in the regional context and also address the role of the international allies of the major parties involved. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Professor Joseph Sassoon in conversation with Dr Michael Willis about his recent book, The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty (Allen Lane, Penguin Group, 2022). Emeritus Professor Avi Shlaim joins them. Abstract: The influential merchants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped the globalization of today. The Sassoons, a Baghdadi-Jewish trading family, built a global trading enterprise by taking advantage of major historical developments during the nineteenth century. Their story is not just one of an Arab Jewish family that settled in India, traded in China, and aspired to be British. It also presents an extraordinary vista into the world in which they lived and prospered economically, politically, and socially. The Global Merchants is not only about their rise, but also about their decline: why it happened, how political and economic changes after the First World War adversely affected them, and finally, how realizing their aspirations to reach the upper echelons of British society led to their disengagement from business and prevented them from adapting to the new economic and political world order. Professor Joseph Sassoon is Director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and Professor of History and Political Economy at Georgetown University. He holds the al-Sabah Chair in Politics and Political Economy of the Arab World. He is also a Senior Associate Member at St Antony’s College, Oxford. In 2013, his book Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge University Press, 2012) won the prestigious British-Kuwait Prize for the best book on the Middle East. Professor Sassoon completed his Ph.D at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He has published extensively on Iraq and its economy and on the Middle East. The Global Merchants is his fifth book. Professor Avi Shlaim is Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College and a former Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2006. His main research interest is the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is author of Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988); The Politics of Partition (1990 and 1998); War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History (1995); The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000, second edition 2014); Lion of Jordan: King Hussein’s Life in War and Peace (2007); and Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (2009). He is co-editor of The Cold War and the Middle East (1997); The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (2001, second edition 2007); and The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences (2012). Professor Shlaim is a frequent contributor to the newspapers and commentator on radio and television on Middle Eastern affairs. Dr Michael Willis is Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford and King Mohammed VI Fellow in Moroccan and Mediterranean Studies. His research interests focus on the politics, modern history and international relations of the central Maghreb states (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco). He is the author of Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from Independence to the Arab Spring (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Islamist Challenge in Algeria: A Political History (Ithaca and New York University Press, 1997) and co-editor of Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring: Triumphs and Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2015). Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Dr Raphaël Lefèvre in conversation with Dr Neil Ketchley about his recent book, 'Jihad in the City: Militant Islamism and Contentious Politics in Tripoli' (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Militant Islamists are often assumed to be driven by global goals and transnational networks. But this narrative misses a crucial point: from Tawhid during the Lebanese civil war to Tahrir al-Sham in the current Syrian conflict, Islamist armed groups often seek to recruit and mobilize local communities not appealed by their religious ideology - certain tribes, social classes, and neighbourhoods. Why? How do they go about it? And to what extent, then, is all Islamist politics local? Dr Raphaël Lefèvre is a Senior Fellow at the University of Oxford and Research Associate at the University of Aarhus. He investigates Islamist armed groups in the Middle East. His latest book is Jihad in the City: Militant Islamism and Contentious Politics in Tripoli (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He is also the author of Ashes of Hama, the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (Oxford University Press, 2013). His PhD thesis which he did at the University of Cambridge was awarded the Bill Gates Sr Prize by the Gates Cambridge Trust and the Syrian Studies Association Prize. Dr Neil Ketchley is Associate Professor in Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations, the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, and a Fellow of St Antony's College. He is a political scientist of the Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa working at the intersections of political sociology and comparative politics. Neil's book, Egypt in a Time of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2017), won the Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award. His current research interests include episodes of mass protest in the MENA, the rise of political Islam in interwar Egypt, and the changing profiles of regional political elites. Join us for our MEC live webinars – registration essential; details available from Middle East Centre Events, St Antony's College or subscribe to our weekly e-mailing newsletter by emailing mec@sant.ox.ac.uk and follow us on Twitter @OxfordMEC Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, University of Oxford Middle East Centre | St Antony's College (ox.ac.uk) https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/research-centres/middle-east-centre Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Marilyn Booth speaking on her new book. This book is an intellectual biography of early Arabic feminist Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1850-1914) and a study of her life in Ottoman Syria and Egypt, in the context of Arabophone debates on gender, modernity and the good society, 1890s-1910. Chapters take up her writing and debates in which she participated, concerning social justice, girls’ education, marriage, divorce and polygyny, the question of ‘Nature’ and Darwinist notions of male/female, and intersections of nationalism, anti-imperialism, and feminism. Fawwaz’s two novels and play are analysed in the context of fiction rewriting history, and on theatre as a reformist tool of public education. The book also comprises a study of some important periodical venues for public debate in Egypt in this period, particularly the nationalist press and one early women’s journal, and it highlights the writings of lesser-studied journalists and other intellectuals, within the context of the Arab/ic Nahda or intellectual revival. The talk will focus particularly on a central argument: that Fawwaz’s feminism, based on an Islamic ethical worldview, was distinct from prevailing ‘modernist’ views in posing a non-essentialist, open-ended notion of gender that did not (for instance) highlight maternalist discourses and that rejected fixed notions of sex-gender identity. Fawwaz’s background was Shi’i, an element that is quietly present in her work. Biography: Marilyn Booth is Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, University of Oxford. Her most recent monograph, The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt (2021), is amongst numerous publications on early feminism, translation, and Arabophone women’s writing in Egypt and Ottoman Syria. Translator of eighteen works of fiction and memoir from the Arabic, she was co-winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies.

Dr Neil Ketchley in conversation with Professor Walter Armbrust about his current research. The post-WWII era saw coups and “revolutions from above” break out across the Middle East and North Africa. How did these events transform colonial-era state elites? We theorize that post-colonial regimes had to choose between purging perceived opponents and delivering key state functions, leading to important variation in individual turnover and survival. To illustrate our argument, we trace the careers of 674 colonial-era ministers and civil servants in Egypt following the 1952 Revolution. Our analysis shows that individuals connected to Egypt's deposed monarch, very senior officials, and those with military backgrounds were more likely to be purged. Experienced officials and those with advanced university degrees were more likely to be retained. Residual workplace effects suggest that the logics of purging threats and retaining experienced officials also operated at the institutional level. The findings point to important instances of elite-level continuity during episodes of radical political change. Dr Neil Ketchley is Associate Professor in Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations, the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, and a Fellow of St Antony's College. He is a political scientist of the Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa working at the intersections of political sociology and comparative politics. Neil's book, Egypt in a Time of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2017), won the Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award. His current research interests include episodes of mass protest in the MENA, the rise of political Islam in interwar Egypt, and the changing profiles of regional political elites. Professor Walter Armbrust is a Hourani Fellow and Professor in Modern Middle Eastern Studies. He is a cultural anthropologist, and author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (1996); Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution (2019); and various other works focusing on popular culture, politics and mass media in Egypt. He is editor of Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond (2000). Additional contributor, Mr Gilad Wenig, PhD student, UCLA. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Join us as we listen to Dr Usaama al-Azami (Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford) in conversation about his new book, 'Islam and the Arab Revolutions, the Ulama between Democracy and Autocracy'. Dr Michael Willis (St Antony’s College) is chairing the webinar. The live webinar took place on 21st January 2022 as part of the Middle East Centre webinar series. The book is available for purchase in the UK from Hurst Publishers, quote the discount code ISLAMARAB35 at check-out for 35% discount; and to purchase outside the UK, from Oxford University Press, quote ADISTA5 for your discount. This video is also available with accessibility features as a podcast at http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/middle-east-centre The Arab revolutions of 2011 were a transformative moment in the modern history of the Middle East, as people rose up against long-standing autocrats throughout the region to call for ‘bread, freedom and dignity’. With the passage of time, results have been decidedly mixed, with abortive success stories like Tunisia contrasting with the emergence of even more repressive dictatorships in places like Egypt, with the backing of several Gulf states. Focusing primarily on Egypt, this book considers a relatively understudied dimension of these revolutions: the role of prominent religious scholars. While pro-revolutionary ulama have justified activism against authoritarian regimes, counter-revolutionary scholars have provided religious backing for repression, and in some cases the mass murder of unarmed protestors. Usaama al-Azami traces the public engagements and religious pronouncements of several prominent ulama in the region, including Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Ali Gomaa and Abdallah bin Bayyah, to explore their role in either championing the Arab revolutions or supporting their repression. He concludes that while a minority of noted scholars have enthusiastically endorsed the counter-revolutions, their approach is attributable less to premodern theology and more to their distinctly modern commitment to the authoritarian state. Biographies Dr Usaama al-Azami read his BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford, and his MA and PhD in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Alongside his university career, he also pursued Islamic studies in seminarial settings in which he has also subsequently taught. He has travelled extensively throughout the Middle East, living for five years in the region. He is also an enthusiastic teacher who is very eager to support the formation of research scholars, and always welcomes students with such aspirations to get in touch with him. Usaama al-Azami is primarily interested in the interaction between Islam and modernity with a special interest in modern developments in Islamic political philosophy. His first book, Islam and the Arab Revolutions looks at the way in which influential Islamic scholars responded to the Arab uprisings of 2011 through 2013. His PhD, which is a separate project which he hopes to develop into a monograph in the near future, is entitled "Modern Islamic Political Thought: Islamism in the Arab World from the Late Twentieth to the Early Twenty-first Centuries". In it, he explores how Arab ulama of a mainstream "Islamist" orientation have engaged Western political concepts such as democracy, secularism and the nation-state, selectively adapting and assimilating aspects of these ideas into their understanding of Islam. His broader interests extend to a range of disciplines from the Islamic scholarly tradition from the earliest period of Islam down to the present. Dr Michael J. Willis is Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford and King Mohammed VI Fellow in Moroccan and Mediterranean Studies. His research interests focus on the politics, modern history and international relations of the central Maghreb states (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco). He is the author of Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from Independence to the Arab Spring (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Islamist Challenge in Algeria: A Political History (Ithaca and New York University Press, 1997) and co-editor of Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring: Triumphs and Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2015). Join us for the live webinar next time – registration essential; details available from Middle East Centre Events | St Antony's College (ox.ac.uk) (https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/research-centres/middle-east-centre/events) or subscribe to our weekly e-mailing newsletter by emailing mec@sant.ox.ac.uk or follow us on Twitter @OxfordMEC Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, University of Oxford Middle East Centre | St Antony's College (ox.ac.uk) https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/research-centres/middle-east-centre

This is a recording of a live webinar held on Friday 3rd December 2021 for the Middle East Centre Like many parts of the world, the environment in the Middle East is in crisis. Climate change, biodiversity loss and unsustainable material extraction will have the same detrimental consequences for life as elsewhere on the planet. In recent years, however, the state of the environment in the Middle East has been framed in a sensationalistic manner; with little evidence, it is blamed for conflict and migration and is predicted to lead to societal collapse. Using a lens of political ecology, this talk will illustrate how these assumptions are problematic; they are rooted in a Western perception of the environment in the Middle East that is determined by cultural and political imaginaries. Political ecology also tells us that the current policies enacted by regional states to address sustainability will probably fail, on the basis that they are technopolitical. But it also tells us that there is a potential for an alternative that offers a more optimistic future, albeit one that requires radical change and a departure from the current system. Christian Henderson is assistant professor at Leiden Institute for Area Studies at Leiden University, Netherlands. His research focusses on the agrarian political economy and the political ecology of the Middle East and North Africa. His work has previously been published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Environment and Planning A, Review of African Political Economy and the Journal of Arabian Studies. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

This is a recording of a live webinar held on Thursday 25th November 2021 for the Middle East centre. Dr Ibrahim al-Marashi (Associate Professor of Middle East history at California State University San Marcos and Visiting Professor at the IE University School of Global and Public Affairs in Madrid, Spain) and Kate Clark (Co-Director and Senior Analyst, Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN), https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org ) present ‘Afghanistan and the Middle East’. Dr Michael Willis (St Antony’s College, Oxford) chairs this webinar. Ibrahim Al-Marashi - Contesting the "Graveyard of Empires" Trope: Situating Afghanistan within Middle East History". First, this talk will examine the relevance of history, particularly Middle Eastern history for understanding the current crisis in Afghanistan, from antiquity to the Soviet invasion of the nation. This talk will examine the relevance of history, particularly Middle Eastern history for understanding the current crisis in Afghanistan. The fall of Kabul has been compared to the 1975 fall of Saigon or the British and Soviet defeats, hence the epitaph of the "Graveyard of Empires." While historical context is crucial, the aforementioned historical tropes are misleading, denying agency to Afghanistan as a nation and people Kate Clark - Killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg: How overnight Afghanistan became a rentier state with no rent. The capture of the Afghan state by the Taliban was an economic calamity. The foreign assistance which had made up 43 per cent of GDP was cut. UN and US sanctions applied to the Taliban as an armed group suddenly applied to the whole country. Afghanistan’s foreign reserves and World Bank funds were frozen and the banking sector was paralysed. The repercussions are already catastrophic: only one in 20 households now have enough to eat. With such shaky economic foundations, will the Taliban’s new Islamic Emirate prove any more sustainable than the old post-2001 Islamic Republic? Biographies: Kate Clark has worked for AAN, a policy research NGO based in Kabul, since 2010. Her research and publications have focussed on the conflict, including militia formation and investigations into breaches of the Laws of War, detentions and the use of torture. She has written extensively on Afghanistan’s political economy, as well as its wildlife and the environment. Kate experienced both of the most recent falls of Kabul, in 2021, and in 2001, when she was the BBC correspondent (1999-2002). During the last years of the first Taleban emirate, she was the only western journalist based in Afghanistan. Kate has also worked at the BBC Arabic Service, on Radio 4 news and current affairs programmes, and has made radio and television documentaries about Afghanistan, including on the insurgency, weapons smuggling, corruption, the opium economy and war crimes. Kate has an MA in Middle Eastern Politics from Exeter University in Britain and has also lived, studied and worked in the Middle East. Ibrahim Al-Marashi obtained his doctorate in Modern History at St Antony's College, University of Oxford, completing a thesis on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. His research focuses on 20th century Iraqi history. He is co-author of Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History (Routledge, 2008), and The Modern History of Iraq, with Phebe Marr (Routledge 2017), and A Concise History of the Middle East (Routledge, 2018). If you would like to join the live audience during this term’s webinar series, you can sign up to receive our MEC weekly newsletter or browse the MEC webpages. The newsletter includes registration details for each week's webinar. Please contact mec@sant.ox.ac.uk to register for the newsletter or follow us on Twitter @OxfordMEC. Accessibility features of this video playlist are available through the University of Oxford Middle East Centre podcast series: http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/middle-east-centre Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

This is a recording of a live webinar held on Friday 19th November 2021 for the MEC. Dr Michael Mason, Director of the Middle East Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science presents “Failing Flows: The Politics of Water Management in Southern Iraq”. Dr Michael Willis (St Antony’s College, Oxford) chairs this webinar. In July 2018 massive protests erupted in Basra city as residents demanded improvements in public services. Failings in water management were at the heart of local grievances: an outbreak of water-related illnesses was triggered by the increased use of polluted water from the Shatt al-Arab, Basra’s principal source of water. However, the deterioration of public water infrastructure has its roots in decades of armed conflict and international sanctions. Tap water has been undrinkable since the 1990s, forcing most households to rely on private water vendors. Water infrastructure upgrading was a priority for state-rebuilding after 2003 but receded under the sectarian civil war. Governmental and donor plans for mega-infrastructure water projects have stalled in the face of political stasis and systemic corruption. Compact water treatment units are the dominant purification technology, supplying 83% of treatment capacity across Basra governorate and 92% in Basra city. The effectiveness of this water treatment technology is reduced by irregular supplies of freshwater from the Bada’a Canal - flows negatively impacted by upstream dam construction, climatic variability and illegal water tapping. There is a pressing need to diversify water sources for Basra and improve the efficiencies of treatment technologies and distribution networks. The LSE report that Dr Michael Mason refers to in his presentation is available from the LSE website: Failing_Flows_003_.pdf (lse.ac.uk) Artworked credit: Azhar Al-Rubaie, 2021 Dr Michael Mason is Director of the Middle East Centre and Associate Professor in Environmental Geography at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is interested in ecological politics and governance as applied to questions of accountability, security and sovereignty. His research addresses both global environmental politics and environmental change in Western Asia/the Middle East. He has a particular interest in environmental issues within conflict-affected areas and occupied territories, including Iraq, northern Cyprus, and the occupied Golan Heights. Alongside articles in a wide range of journals and chapter contributions, he is the author or editor of five books, of which the most recent is the forthcoming co-edited volume, The Untold Story of the Golan Heights (2022). Dr Michael J. Willis is Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford and King Mohammed VI Fellow in Moroccan and Mediterranean Studies. His research interests focus on the politics, modern history and international relations of the central Maghreb states (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco). He is the author of Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from Independence to the Arab Spring (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Islamist Challenge in Algeria: A Political History (Ithaca and New York University Press, 1997) and co-editor of Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring: Triumphs and Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2015). If you would like to join the live audience during this term’s webinar series, you can sign up to receive our MEC weekly newsletter or browse the MEC webpages. The newsletter includes registration details for each week's webinar. Please contact mec@sant.ox.ac.uk to register for the newsletter or follow us on Twitter @OxfordMEC. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

This is a recording of a live webinar held on Friday 12th November 2021 for the MEC. Dr Mattin Biglari (SOAS, University of London) presents “Air Pollution, Toxicity, and Environmental Politics in the History of Iranian Oil Nationalisation”. Dr Stephanie Cronin (Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford) chairs this webinar. As we witness the increasingly visible effects of the global climate emergency, it is paramount that the study of the environment is better integrated into the social sciences and humanities. This is especially so in the case of Iran, where the recent drying up of rivers in the province of Khuzestan has caused water scarcity for the local population and led to subsequent political mobilisation. Yet it is also vital to consider less spectacular forms of environmental degradation that equally afflict the country today, particularly air pollution, which presents one of the world’s greatest health challenges and each year contributes to over 8 million deaths globally. This talk will turn attention to the toxicity of air pollution to illuminate its relationship to embodied subjectivity, (in)visibility, temporality and infrastructure, especially with reference to the politics of Iran’s oil nationalisation in 1951. By focusing on subaltern experiences in the oil refinery town of Abadan, it will offer an alternative account to challenge dominant nationalist narratives of this important episode in the country’s history. In doing so, it connects the modern history of Iran to a burgeoning body of work in the environmental and energy humanities that highlights the relationship between global pollution and imperialism in the Middle East and wider Global South. Dr Mattin Biglari is a Research Associate and Teaching Fellow at SOAS. His research focuses on the intersection of energy, environment, infrastructure and labour, especially in the history of Iran and the Middle East. His doctoral thesis, which was awarded the 2021 BRISMES Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize for best PhD dissertation, examines the technopolitics of Iranian oil nationalisation, especially focusing on expertise, labour and anti-colonialism in Abadan. His monograph based on this thesis entitled Refining Knowledge: Labour, Politics and Oil Nationalisation in Iran, 1933-51 will be published with Edinburgh University Press in 2023. Mattin has also published about banditry in Iran during the early twentieth century, examining its relationship to the country’s constitutional revolution and integration into the capitalist world economy. He has also written an article in Diplomatic History about how perceptions of Shi’a Islam shaped U.S. foreign policy during the 1978-79 Iranian revolution. Mattin completed his PhD in History at SOAS in 2020. Previously he attained an MA in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at SOAS and a BA in History at the University of Cambridge. Stephanie Cronin is Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Research Fellow, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. She is the author of Armies and State-building in the Modern Middle East: Politics, Nationalism and Military Reform (I. B. Tauris, 2014); Shahs, Soldiers and Subalterns in Iran: Opposition, Protest and Revolt, 1921-1941 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflict and the New State, 1921-1941 (Routledge, 2006); and The Army and the Creation of the Pahlavi State in Iran, 1910-1926 (I. B. Tauris, 1997). She is the editor of Subalterns and Social Protest: History from Below in the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge, 2007); Reformers and Revolutionaries in Modern Iran: New Perspectives on the Iranian Left (Routledge, 2004); and The Making of Modern Iran; State and Society under Riza Shah, 1921-1941 (Routledge, 2003). Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

On 25 July 2021 Tunisian President Kais Saied dismissed the government and suspended parliament, subsequently employing the army and security forces around government buildings to thwart any opposition to his power grab. How did Tunisia – long hailed as a democratic model in the region – reach such a stage? Who is President Saied and what does he plan on doing? What are his sources of power and support, both within Tunisia and internationally? And does his power grab mean the end of Tunisian democracy? This panel will tackle these questions and more. Youssef Cherif runs the Columbia Global Centers | Tunis, the North and West African research centre of Columbia University. He is a Tunis-based political analyst, member of Carnegie’s Civic Activism Network, and a regular contributor to number of think-tanks (Carnegie, ISPI, IAI, IEMed, etc.). He consulted previously for IWPR, IACE, the United Nations, The Carter Center, and the Tunisian Institute for Strategic Studies (ITES). He comments on North African affairs for several media outlets, including Al Jazeera, BBC, DW, France 24, among others. He holds a Chevening Master of Arts in International Relations from the Dept. of War Studies of King's College London, and a Fulbright Master of Arts in Classical Studies from Columbia University. Youssef is the editor of the book The Modern Arab State: A Decade of Uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2021. Dr Anne Wolf is a Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford, where she teaches Authoritarian Politics. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford (St Antony’s College) and an MPhil in Politics and International Relations from the University of Cambridge (Clare College), where she was previously the Margaret Smith Research Fellow in Politics and International Relations (Girton College). Her 2017 book Political Islam in Tunisia: The History of Ennahda, published by Oxford University Press, won the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. Her second book, Ben Ali’s Tunisia: Power and Contention in an Authoritarian Regime is forthcoming with OUP. Wolf has published numerous journal articles on Authoritarian Politics in the Arab world. She is an Associate Editor at the Journal of North African Studies and a Senior Research Fellow at the Project of Middle East Democracy.

Oil price volatility and accelerated energy transitions away from hydrocarbons to meet climate change mitigation measures have presented existential threats to the economies of hydrocarbon-dependent welfare states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). These state rely on oil and gas not only in their exports to fund welfare distributive measures, but also domestically for highly-subsidized energy and water consumption. In response, each GCC state announced economic development plans presented as avant-garde “Visions”—one tailored to each of the six GCC states— reflecting a future target of transformation away from oil and gas through energy and economic diversification and reform. In a fundamental policy shift, GCC states implemented energy subsidy reform following the 2014 oil price declines, with varying degrees of success. In another fundamental policy shift in October 2020, in preparation for COP26 in Glasgow, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 or 2060. Beyond the economic pressures, GCC states also face environmental challenges owing to their highly subsidized energy and water consumption and emissions in an already-constrained environment owing to climate change. This talk summarizes the state of the environment in the Gulf states and examines the role of the environment in the economic and energy diversification plans of their Visions. It argues that the environment has had a limited role in the Visions, despite the state of the environment in the region, offering a striking difference with other regions. The talk concludes with implications on the region’s long-term sustainability and success of proposed reforms. MEC Friday Webinar. This is a recording of a live webinar held on 5th November 2021 for the MEC Friday Seminar Michaelmas Term 2021 series on the overall theme of The Environment and The Middle East. Dr Manal Shehabi (Academic Visitor, St. Antony's College, University of Oxford; and Senior Research Fellow, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies) presents “Environment Discounted: Energy and Economic Diversification Plans in the Gulf”. Professor Walter Armbrust (St Antony’s College, Oxford) chairs this webinar, and Dr Michael Willis is the Q&A Moderator. The combination of oil price volatility and the accelerated energy transitions away from hydrocarbons to meet climate change mitigation measures have presented existential threats to the economies of hydrocarbon-dependent welfare states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). These state rely on oil and gas not only in their exports to fund welfare distributive measures, but also domestically for highly-subsidized energy and water consumption. In response, each GCC state announced economic development plans presented as avant-garde “Visions”—one tailored to each of the six GCC states— reflecting a future target of transformation away from oil and gas through energy and economic diversification and reform. In a fundamental policy shift, GCC states implemented energy subsidy reform following the 2014 oil price declines, with varying degrees of success. In another fundamental policy shift in October 2020, in preparation for COP26 in Glasgow, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 or 2060. Beyond the economic pressures, GCC states also face environmental challenges owing to their highly subsidized energy and water consumption and emissions in an already-constrained environment owing to climate change. This talk summarizes the state of the environment in the Gulf states and examines the role of the environment in the economic and energy diversification plans of their Visions. It argues that the environment has had a limited role in the Visions, despite the state of the environment in the region, offering a striking difference with other regions. The talk concludes with implications on the region’s long-term sustainability and success of proposed reforms. Dr Manal Shehabi is an applied economist with expertise in economic, energy, resource sustainability & policy making in resource-dependent economies, focusing on the Middle East and Gulf regions. She publishes in academic journals, books, and policy reports. Using economy-wide modeling and political economy, her research made important contributions to the analysis of economic and energy diversification, economic adjustments, decarbonization and hydrogen, and policy alternatives in Gulf hydrocarbon economies following the energy transition and oil price volatility. Her research also impacted policy making, for example she constructed an economic model for policymaking in Kuwait, led or co-authored various policy reports (such as to the UNFCCC, KISR, the IPCC, and G20’s T20 Italy), and conducted capacity building for economic and climate policymakers in Gulf countries and beyond. A polyglot, regularly advises policymakers & firms. Professor Walter Armbrust is a Hourani Fellow and Professor in Modern Middle Eastern Studies. He is a cultural anthropologist, and author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (1996); Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution (2019); and various other works focusing on popular culture, politics and mass media in Egypt. He is editor of Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond (2000). Dr Michael J. Willis is Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford and King Mohammed VI Fellow in Moroccan and Mediterranean Studies. His research interests focus on the politics, modern history and international relations of the central Maghreb states (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco). He is the author of Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from Independence to the Arab Spring (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Islamist Challenge in Algeria: A Political History (Ithaca and New York University Press, 1997) and co-editor of Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring: Triumphs and Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2015). If you would like to join the live audience during this term’s webinar series, you can sign up to receive our MEC weekly newsletter or browse the MEC webpages. The newsletter includes registration details for each week's webinar. Please contact mec@sant.ox.ac.uk to register for the newsletter or follow us on Twitter @OxfordMEC. Accessibility features of this video playlist are available through the University of Oxford Middle East Centre podcast series: http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/middle-east-centre

This is a recording of a live webinar held on 29th October 2021 for the MEC Friday Seminar Michaelmas Term 2021 series on the overall theme of The Environment and The Middle East. Dr Jamie Furniss (Institut de recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain (Tunis) / Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh) presents: The blue-clad fennec: authoritarian environmentalism in Tunisia, and its afterlives. Professor Walter Armbrust (St Antony’s College, Oxford) chairs this webinar, including the Q&A session. There is hardly a city in the whole of Tunisia without a faded sign reading “Boulevard de l’environnement” (Shari‘ al-bi’a) on one of its most prominent thoroughfares. If it hasn’t fallen over from neglect or been removed—for example by angry protesters or as a sort of nostalgic and kitsch lawn ornament—one may find a statue of desert fox (Fennec) in a blue jumpsuit, minus a few limbs, standing at the end of the avenue. These are the traces of the authoritarian environmentalism of Ben Ali’s Tunisia, the forms and afterlives of which this paper seeks to sketch. I begin by arguing that environment emerged as a category of political action in 1990s Tunisia largely as a way of papering over the totalitarian state by appealing to strategic hot-button issues in the eyes of the “West” (like women’s rights), as well as an attempt at aesthetic and moral discipline. I then evoke some of the consequences this genealogy has on the ways “environment” is used and understood in Tunisia today. What exactly does “environment” refer to in Tunisia is both a necessary contextual backdrop to this paper and a question that emerges from the political and social history I aim to examine. From some examples such as analysis of the Arabic terms (bi’a vs. muhit), the discourse in public signage pertaining to waste, the creation in 2017 of Tunisia’s “environmental police” and participant observation I have conducted on civil society “environmental” projects, I attempt to demonstrate that environment is a concept characterized by visuality and proximity. This makes garbage and in particular its visual accumulation in public space a kind of archetypal “environmental problem”. The rapid political telescoping of waste into issues of corruption (e.g. during the “Italian waste scandal”) as well as the use of cleanup as a political idiom (e.g. during the halit wa‘I movement following Kais Said’s election as president) are indices of ongoing political overtones of the issues of waste, cleanliness, and environment more broadly, in contemporary Tunisia. Dr Jamie Furniss is currently a researcher at the Institut de recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain in Tunis, on leave from a position as a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. He has a DPhil from the University of Oxford in International Development and has conducted fieldwork in Egypt and Tunisia, primarily on topics pertaining to environment, waste, and urban development. Professor Walter Armbrust is a Hourani Fellow and Professor in Modern Middle Eastern Studies. He is a cultural anthropologist, and author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (1996); Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution (2019); and various other works focusing on popular culture, politics and mass media in Egypt. He is editor of Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond (2000). If you would like to join the live audience during this term’s webinar series, you can sign up to receive our MEC weekly newsletter or browse the MEC webpages. The newsletter includes registration details for each week's webinar. Please contact mec@sant.ox.ac.uk to register for the newsletter or follow us on Twitter @OxfordMEC. Accessibility features of this video playlist are available through the University of Oxford Middle East Centre podcast series: http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/middle-east-centre

Dr Hussam Hussein investigates the construction of the discourse of water scarcity in Jordan, and the political economy of the water sector. This is a recording of a live webinar held on 22nd October 2021 for the MEC Friday Seminar Michaelmas Term 2021 series on the overall theme of The Environment and The Middle East. Dr Hussam Hussein (Lecturer in International Relations at DPIR, Oxford Martin School Fellow in Water Diplomacy, and Fulford Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College) presents the politics of water scarcity in the case of Jordan. Dr Neil Ketchley (St Antony’s College, Oxford) chairs this webinar and Dr Michael Willis (St Antony’s College, Oxford) moderates the Q&A. This talk investigates the construction of the discourse of water scarcity in Jordan, and the political economy of the water sector. It identifies the actors constructing the discourse and the elements comprising the discourse. The research finds that there is a single dominant discourse of water scarcity, which is composed of two narratives: water insufficiency and water mismanagement. The water insufficiency narrative is constructed to emphasise factors external to the responsibility of the Jordanian government as reasons for water scarcity, like nature, refugees, and neighbouring countries. It is mainly constructed by governmental aligned actors and deployed to open solutions on the supply and conservation sides and ultimately to maintain the status quo of the current water uses. The water mismanagement narrative is constructed to emphasise as reasons for water scarcity factors of mismanagement of water resources and deployed to increase economic efficiency in the water sector, challenging existing uses, allocations, and benefits. Dr Hussam Hussein’s research focuses on the role of discourses in shaping water policies in the Middle East, on transboundary water governance, and on issues related to the political economy of water resources in arid and semi-arid regions. Hussam has also worked on issues of sustainable development and environmental governance for the Italian Embassy in Jordan, the European Parliament, the World Bank and UNICEF. He obtained his PhD from the University of East Anglia with a thesis on hydropolitics and discourses of water scarcity in the case of Jordan. Dr Neil Ketchley is Associate Professor in Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) and the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA). His research focuses on the dynamics of protest and activism in the Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa. His most recent book, Egypt in a Time of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2017), won the Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association. His work has appeared in journals such as the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, and Mobilization. Neil's current research interests include episodes of historic mass protest in the MENA, the rise of political Islam in Egypt, and the changing profiles of regional political elites. Dr Michael J. Willis is Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford and King Mohammed VI Fellow in Moroccan and Mediterranean Studies. His research interests focus on the politics, modern history and international relations of the central Maghreb states (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco). He is the author of Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from Independence to the Arab Spring (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Islamist Challenge in Algeria: A Political History (Ithaca and New York University Press, 1997) and co-editor of Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring: Triumphs and Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2015). If you would like to join the live audience during this term’s webinar series, you can sign up to receive our MEC weekly newsletter or browse the MEC webpages. The newsletter includes registration details for each week's webinar. Please contact mec@sant.ox.ac.uk to register for the newsletter or follow us on Twitter @OxfordMEC. Accessibility features of this video playlist are available through the University of Oxford Middle East Centre podcast series: http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/middle-east-centre

MEC Friday Webinar. This is a recording of a live webinar held on 15th October 2021 for the first episode of the MEC Friday Seminar Michaelmas Term 2021 series on the overall theme of The Environment and The Middle East. MEC Friday Webinar. This is a recording of a live webinar held on 15th October 2021 for the first episode of the MEC Friday Seminar Michaelmas Term 2021 series on the overall theme of The Environment and The Middle East. Oxford academics Dr Michael Willis, Professor Walter Armbrust, Dr Laurent Mignon and Dr Usaama al-Azami reflect upon how issues of the Environment relate to their own research. Dr Michael J. Willis is Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford and King Mohammed VI Fellow in Moroccan and Mediterranean Studies. His research interests focus on the politics, modern history and international relations of the central Maghreb states (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco). He is the author of Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from Independence to the Arab Spring (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Islamist Challenge in Algeria: A Political History (Ithaca and New York University Press, 1997) and co-editor of Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring: Triumphs and Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2015). Professor Walter Armbrust is a Hourani Fellow and Professor in Modern Middle Eastern Studies. He is a cultural anthropologist, and author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (1996); Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution (2019); and various other works focusing on popular culture, politics and mass media in Egypt. He is editor of Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond (2000). Dr Laurent Mignon is Associate Professor of Turkish language and literature at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Antony’s College and Affiliate Professor at the Luxembourg School of Religion and Society. His research focuses on the minor literatures of Ottoman and Republican Turkey, in particular Jewish literatures, as well as the literary engagement with non-Abrahamic religions during the era straddling the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. In March and April 2019, he was invited as Visiting Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He is an Associate Member of the Centre de Recherche Europes-Eurasie at INALCO, Paris. His newest publications are: Uncoupling Language and Religion: An Exploration into the Margins of Turkish Literature, Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021. https://www.academicstudiespress.com/ottomanandturkishstudies/uncoupling-language-and-religion Alberto Ambrosio and Laurent Mignon (ed.), Penser l'islam en Europe: Perspectives du Luxembourg et d'ailleurs, Paris: Hermann, 2021. https://www.editions-hermann.fr/livre/9791037005472 Dr Usaama al-Azami is Departmental Lecturer in Contemporary Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford. He read his BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford and his MA and PhD in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Alongside his university career, he also pursued Islamic studies in seminarial settings in which he has also subsequently taught. He has travelled extensively throughout the Middle East, living for five years in the region. Usaama al-Azami is primarily interested in the interaction between Islam and modernity with a special interest in modern developments in Islamic political thought. His latest book, Islam and the Arab Revolutions: Ulama Between Democracy and Autocracy (Hurst Publishers, October 2021; Oxford University Press, USA, forthcoming 2022) looks at the way in which influential Islamic scholars responded to the Arab uprisings of 2011 through 2013. His broader interests extend to a range of disciplines from the Islamic scholarly tradition from the earliest period of Islam down to the present. If you would like to join the live audience during this term’s webinar series, you can sign up to receive our MEC weekly newsletter or browse the MEC webpages. The newsletter includes registration details for each week's webinar. Please contact mec@sant.ox.ac.uk to register for the newsletter or follow us on Twitter @OxfordMEC.

Dr Orkideh Behrouzan (SOAS University of London), gives a talk for the Middle East Centre seminar series on 21st May 2021, chaired by Edmund Herzig (Faculty of Oriental Studies). Discussant: Dr Maziyar Ghiabi (University of Exeter). Iran has been one of the worst hit countries by the Coronavirus pandemic, while its pandemic response has been shaped by the politicization of the outbreak and the securitization of information about it. This landscape of suspicion reveals a particular form of biopolitics that underlies the society’s structures of social and moral immunity, which are significant in determining the afterlife of a pandemic and emerging local and global biologies and socialities. This project is an attempt to trace the psychological life of the Coronavirus pandemic and the psycho-politics of its emergence and evolution, in order to understand the specific processes and forces in which the pandemic gains a local life and what it reveals about society. Biographies: Orkideh Behrouzan is a physician, medical anthropologist, anthropologist of science and technology, and the author of Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran (2016, Stanford University Press). She is the founder of the Beyond Trauma Initiative, and a bilingual author and poet in Persian and English. For more, please see: https://www.orkidehbehrouzan.com Maziyar Ghiabi is a Wellcome Lecturer in Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter. His primary work has concerned the study of illegal drugs and ‘addiction’ in West Asia and in the global South. Maziyar’s current project is titled Living ‘Addiction’ in States of Disruption funded by Wellcome Trust (2021-26). Before this, Maziyar was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Drugs & (Dis)Order Project, based at the SOAS (University of London) and held research and teaching positions at Oxford University, the EHESS and SciencesPO. His first book Drugs Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran (London: Cambridge University Press, 2019, also in Open Access) was awarded the 2020 Best Book of the Year (Nikki Keddie Prize) by the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA). Maziyar obtained his DPhil in Politics from Oxford University in 2017

Professor Marie Ladier-Fouladi (CNRS)/ CETOBaC) gives a talk for the MEC Women's Rights Research Seminars. Chaired by Soraya Tremayne (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology). Marie Ladier-Fouladi is a senior Researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)/ CETOBaC (Centre d’Études Turques, Ottomanes, Balkaniques et Centrasiatiques) and professor of Political Sociology and Population Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Marie Ladier-Fouladi earned her Ph.D. in Demography and Social Sciences from the EHESS (École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales - Paris) in 1999 and entered CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) in 2000. In 2012, she earned her full Professorship (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches -HDR) in Demography and Social Sciences. The title of her HDR’s dissertation was: “Understanding the Socio-Political Change Through the Prism of Demography”. In October 2019, she joined the Centre for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan and Central Asian Studies (CETOBaC). Her research investigates the relationship between demographic changes and socio-political transformations, especially relying on the case of Iran. This approach consists in analyzing demographic phenomena by putting them in relation to their context, in the historical, social, economic, and political perspective. It is from this reflection on the relationship between demography and politics, and the perspectives they open up to understand social behaviors that she has defined her methodological approach. She has conducted several research projects on women and youth as new protagonists of political change in Iran, family and solidarity networks, social policy, immigration policy, political elections and population’s political horizon in Iran. She recently started working on a new research program entitled: From Global to Local: The Disturbing Future of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 2010, the Iranian government reversed the neo-Malthusian policy it had introduced in December 1989, and opted for a new population policy that I will define as populationist. It consisted in deploying all possible means to reach a target population of 150 million, within an unspecified timeframe though. The supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, fully endorsed this policy, and in May 2014, for the sake of speeding up the process, he drew up a strategic program in a 14-article decree, called “Population General Policies”, which sanctioned the state’s new population policy, and instructed the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary powers to implement it. Grounded in the alleged threat of population aging due to birth control and declining fertility, the new population policy aims to accelerate population growth by reversing the downward trend in fertility. There is no doubt that the process of population aging has started in Iran, but not to the extent that this demographic evolution may justify the implementation of incentive, coercive and particularly aggressive measures in order to entice Iranian people into having more children. While, by reappropriating their fertility, Iranian women succeeded in coming out of “the male sphere of domination” and thus reaching dignity and equality, they again find themselves subject to injunctions that violate their reproductive health rights and thereby their human rights. I first shed light on the actual yet concealed objective of the new population policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The examination of coercive as well as incentives measures shall then evidence the detrimental effect of this new policy on Iranian women's rights.