The Arab world today is experiencing “its second great fragmentation and reconfiguration of the past century,” according to respected journalist and Middle East analyst Rami G. Khouri. Acknowledging that there is not really an “Arab world,” and the Arab League only exists “on paper” anymore, he used the term "the Arab region" as a geographic…
On October 15-16, 2017, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) held a working group under its research initiative on “Water and Conflict in the Middle East.” Over the course of two days, experts engaged in group discussions aimed at identifying a series of original research questions related to competition and cooperation over water in…
On October 9, 2017, Waleed Zahoor, Publications Intern at Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS), and a senior student at Georgetown University in Qatar, was invited to hold a rabab recital, a stringed instrument known as the lion of instruments played mainly in Afghanistan, Iran, and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. Santosh Kulkarni,…
On September 24-25, 2017, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) held a second two-day working group under its research initiative on “Sports, Society, and the State in the Middle East.” During this working group, contributors presented their draft papers on a number of subtopics related to their areas of expertise and interest, and…
“Crisis in the GCC: Causes, Consequences, and Prospects” was the topic of a panel discussion hosted by the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar (GUQ) on September 17, 2017. Featured panelists included Gerd Nonneman, Professor of International Relations and Gulf Studies at GUQ; Abdullah Baabood, Director of the Gulf…
On August 20-21, 2017, CIRS hosted the second working group of its project on “Middle Power Politics in the Middle East.” Over two days, scholars discussed key gaps in the literature on the international relations of the Middle East through the lens of middle power theory. Participants led discussions on related subtopics including the role…
On June 9, 2017, CIRS hosted a CIRS Research Workshop at the Georgetown University campus in Washington D.C. The workshop, which was a closed-door, one-day seminar, brought together a small number of renowned scholars to engage in a focused discussion on a book manuscript titled Inside the Arab State: Institutions, Actors, and Processes. This manuscript is…
In December 2016 CIRS launched a grants cycle to fund empirical research on the subject of “Mobility, Displacement, and Forced Migration in the Middle East,” and on May 21–22, 2017 the first working group under this project was convened in Doha. Seven teams of successful grant awardees were brought together with a number of other scholars…
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;…
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…
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…
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…