On January 10-11, 2017, urbanists, governance experts, and climate change specialists gathered in Doha for a two-day workshop co-hosted by the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the…
On January 15-16, 2017, the Center for International and Regional Studies held a working group under its research initiative on “Middle Power Politics in the Middle East.” Over the course…
Award-winning filmmaker Suzi Mirgani recently hosted a screening of her latest work, titled Caravan, to an audience of students, staff, faculty, and guests at Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q). The…
On January 29-30 2017, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) hosted a working group on “Highly Skilled Migrants: The Gulf and Global Perspectives.” This working group took place…
Reach Out To Asia is a Qatar-based non-profit organization that works to ensure that people affected by crisis across Asia and the Middle East have continuous access to relevant and…
On February 12-13, 2017, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) held its second working group under the research initiative on “Leading the Faithful: The Role of Religious Authorities…
Student enrollment in higher education institutions has rapidly increased in most Middle Eastern countries in recent years. Governments have shown a strong commitment to higher education, and there has been…
On March 12-13, 2017, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) held a working group under its research initiative on “Sports, Society, and the State in the Middle East.” During the course of two days, participants identified key gaps in the literature on sports in the Middle East through the lenses of their various…
While human rights issues faced by low-wage migrant workers in the Gulf region have been widely reported on, the related issue of “recruitment fees” paid by these workers in their countries of origin – central to the experience of so many migrants – hasn’t received as much attention. There are legitimate costs associated with…
On April 2, 2017, CIRS held the second working group under its research initiative on “The ‘Resource Curse’ in the Gulf.” During the working group, the participants presented their original contributions to the literature on rentier state theory, and covered a variety of related subtopics, including: rents, neopatrimonialism, and entrepreneurial state capitalism in the Gulf; co-optation…
On September 21, 2013, four members of the Somalia-based militant group al-Shabaab attacked the upscale Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. The attack turned into a 4-day siege, as Kenyan police and military were ill-equipped to manage the chaotic and dangerous situation. In the end, at least 71 people were killed—including civilians, soldiers, police officers, and…
Abdullah Al-Arian asked his audience to reflect back six years, to the hopefulness that emerged in spring 2011, when decades-old authoritarian regimes were on the brink of collapse. Leaders of Tunisia and Egypt had been overthrown by mass uprisings in their respective countries; the regimes in Yemen and Libya were on the verge of collapse;…