Past Conferences

Our annual conference, the largest and most prestigious UK gathering of scholars focused on the MENA region, has taken place since 1995. We have been fortunate to be hosted by many great institutions, including, in recent years, the universities of Exeter, St Andrews, Leeds, Edinburgh and Dublin, as well as universities in London such as King’s College, LSE and SOAS.

2024: Proliferating Entanglements: Matter and Meaning in the Middle East

Host: Lancaster University

Keynotes:

Professor Salwa Ismail, School of Oriental and African Studies: The Politics and Matter of Liveable Lives in the Middle East

Mezna Qato, University of Cambridge, Rafeef Ziadah, King's College London, Akram Salhab, Queen Mary University of London, Malaka Shwaikh, University of St Andrews, and Nimer Sultany, School of Oriental and African Studies: Gaza in the Face of Genocide

Conference Theme:

In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad develops the term “entanglement”, a concept that captures how “existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating”. That is, objects, events, ideas and agents are not separate entities with inherent properties, but phenomena that emerge from their mutual relations. Barad’s work not only seeks to transform the way we understand the world, it also strives to trace and make such intra-actions visible in an effort to reconfigure the relations that shape our world. In this conference, we seek to interrogate life, matter and meaning in the Middle East by way of these relations, and the entanglements that underpin them.

Entanglements between the legal, political, social, economic, and spatial take on a range of forms, conditioning not only the spectacular and momentous but also the ordinary and the everyday. They resonate across all aspects of life, shaping the articulation of identities, languages, arts, landscapes, not to mention politics within states, between states and globally. In this conference, we seek to unpack the nature of these connections, relations and encounters from an array of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. We are particularly keen to explore how the prism of entanglement may illuminate dynamics within, between and across the societies and polities of the Middle East.

2023: Ecology, Crisis, and Power in the Middle East

Host: University of Exeter

Keynotes:

Associate Professor Jessica Barnes, University of South Carolina: Placing the Environment in Middle East Studies: Scale, Stories, and Everyday Life

Professor Sharzhad Mojab, University of Toronto: A Revolutionary Storm Sparked by the Fall of a Butterfly

Conference Theme:

It is widely expected that the Middle East will be one of the areas of the world most impacted by anthropogenic climate change, with predictions of sharp fluctuations in temperature and sea levels, changing precipitation patterns, and increased frequency of extreme weather events. Much analysis of these climactic effects, however, tends to focus on their techno-scientific dimensions, ignoring what they might mean for established patterns of political and economic power in the region. In this context, it is essential to consider how ecological change might intersect with the region’s multiple and interconnected crises, including unprecedented levels of human displacement, food and water scarcity, war and violence, and some of the highest levels of economic inequality and social marginalisation in the world. The ways in which these crises reinforce and overlap with ecological change will shape future dynamics of political, social, and economic power in the region. Similarly, how have actors, both in the private and public sector, been preparing for climate change? What renewable and other technologies have they embraced and what are their implications? Despite some important emerging research on these themes, issues of ecology have not been adequately addressed in Middle East studies. The Middle East is also largely absent in contemporary debates around climate change. This theme is also broad and necessarily interdisciplinary, inviting contributions from across the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences.

Some of the potential questions that could be addressed within this theme, include:  

• What are the potential implications of climate change on social, political, and economic structures in the region, including the nature of authoritarianism, neoliberalism, securitisation, and the cycles of ‘contentious politics’?
• What might the intersectionalities of crisis and climate change mean for the most marginalised populations in the region, including women, youth, minorities, and displaced populations?
• How are social movements in the region confronting, challenging, and contesting the potential implications of climate change? 
• How are narratives of ‘ecological crisis’ wielded by elites in the region, and what role do ecological demands play in the wider political imaginary?
• How are global initiatives to address and mitigate the effects of climate change connected to existing economic reform packages promoted by multilateral organisations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund?
• How is climate change – and the urgent need to end global fossil fuel production – reshaping the region’s place in global capitalism?
• What are the political, economic, and cultural implications of the ‘energy transition’ in the Middle East? How are we to understand the significant role of major Middle East states – especially in the Gulf – in global renewable energy projects, alongside the on-going expansion of traditional fossil fuel sectors?
• Given the widespread exclusion of the Middle East in contemporary ecological debates, what can the study of the region bring to our understanding of climate change and campaigns for a ‘just ecological transition’?
• What does climate change mean for the lives of rural farmers, and the rural-urban relationship?
• What can contemporary ecological debates around notions such as the ‘Anthropocene’, ‘Fossil Capital’, and the ‘New Green Deal’ contribute to our understanding of the Middle East?
• What are the implications of climate change for the nature of food regimes in the region? How are states, multilateral organisations, and private corporations intervening in the circulation of food across the region, given the significant impact that climate change is expected to have on the production of food? 
• What role has environmental change played in earlier periods of Middle East history, including pre-colonial times? 

2020/2021 - Knowledge, Power and Middle Eastern Studies

Host: University of Kent

Keynotes:

Professor Caroline Rooney, University of Kent
‘The Revolution is a Woman’: From Woke Culture to the Arab Awakening

Dr amina wadud, National Islamic University of Jogjakarta
Islamic Feminism: What’s in a Name?

Professor Pinar Bilgin, Bilkent University
Nowhere to run? Decolonising the study of the Middle East between Area Studies and International Relations

2018 New Approaches to Studying the Middle East

Host: King’s College London

Keynotes:

Professor Ussama Makdisi,
The Harmony of Coexistence in the Modern Middle East

Professor Lara Deeb
Quiet Constraints on Scholarship: Self-Censorship, Refusal, and Topics We Wish Did Not Exist

Dr Seteney Shami 
Knowledge at Risk: Studying the Middle East in a Disordered World

2016 – Networks: Connecting the Middle East through Time, Space and Cyberspace

Host: University of Wales Trinity St David

Keynote:

Grahame Davies
The Dragon and the Crescent

2014 – The Middle East in Global Perspective: Interactions Across Time and Space

Host: University of Sussex

Keynotes:

Professor Marilyn Booth, University of Edinburgh and Professor Mark Sedgwick, University of Aarhus
The Middle East in Global Perspective I

Professor Francis Robinson, University of Oxford and Dr Andrew Arsan, University of Cambridge
The Middle East in Global Perspective II

Professor Asef Bayat, University of Illinois
After the Arab Spring

2012 – Revolution and Revolt: Understanding the Forms and Causes of Change

Host: London School of Economics, Middle East Centre

Keynotes:

Professor Ghassan Salamé, Dean of the Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA)
Revolution and Revolt: Understanding the Forms and Causes of Change in the Arab World

Rt Hon William Hague MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
International Policy Responses to Change in the Arab World Annual Conference

2010 – Third World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies in Barcelona

2008 – Mapping Middle Eastern and North African Diasporas

Host: University of Leeds

Keynotes:

Professor Kim Knott, University of Leeds

Professor Michael W. Suleiman, Kansas State University

2007 – EURAMES Conference in Freiburg

2005 – Renaissance, Representation and Identity

Host: Durham University

Keynotes:

Professor Fred Halliday

Professor Robert Hillenbrand

Sir Harold Walker

2003 – Education as a Force for Change?

Host: University of Exeter

Keynotes:

Tariq Ali
America’s Moment in the Middle East

Jonathan Berkey, Davidson College, North Carolina
Education as a Force for Change: A Medievalist’s Reflection on a Modern Problem

Heads of Departments of Middle East Studies in the UK
Middle East Studies in the UK

2001 – The View from the Top: State and People in the Middle East and North Africa

Host: University of Edinburgh

Keynote:

Dr Sami Zubaida, Birkbeck, University of London
Citizen and Community in Middle Eastern Politics

1999 – EURAMES conference in Ghent

1997 – Re-Thinking Islam

Host: University of Oxford

Keynotes:

Michael Bonner, University of Michigan and Rudolph Peters, University of Amsterdam
Re-Thinking Islam: Jihad

Derek Fatchett MP, Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs responsible for Asia and the Middle East
Speaker at the conference dinner

1995 – The Middle East and the Environment

Host: Durham University

Keynotes:

Dr Mundhir Abdul Salam, UNESCWA

Dr Clive Agnew, University College London