On December 8–9, 2012, CIRS convened its first Working Group meeting under the research initiative “Weak States in the Greater Middle East.” Participants employed a multi-disciplinary approach to critically analyze the terminology of weak and failing states, and the political implications associated with states being characterized as such. In addition to exploring cross-cutting themes on the…
On January 5–6, 2013, CIRS held a working group meeting under the research initiative “Politics and the Media in the Post-Arab Spring Middle East.” Given the profound socio-political transitions within Arab states in the wake of the Arab Spring, participants used a multidisciplinary approach to analyze shifts in the role of the media and how it…
Former Foreign Minister of Thailand and career diplomat Kasit Piromya was the featured speaker for a CIRS Monthly Dialoguelecture on January 22, 2013. His Excellency Piromya’s talk, titled “Southeast Asia’s Role in Global Food Security,” focused on the role of Southeast Asian countries as major exporters of food and as the “food cradle” or “food kitchen”…
Richard Schofield, an expert on the study of historical territorial disputes, delivered a CIRS Monthly Dialogue lecture on “Territorializing when Decolonizing: Britain Tries to Square its Circles in the Gulf, 1968-1971” on February 5, 2013. Schofield, who is Convenor of the Master’s programme in Geopolitics, Territory, and Security at King’s College in London, examined the period of…
H.E. Munir Ghannam, Ambassador of Palestine in Qatar, delivered a Focused Discussion lecture on February 13, 2013, on the topic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Ambassador introduced the lecture by noting that “the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which is part of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” has a long and turbulent history that has been ongoing for over a century. Giving…
Maha Al-Hendawi, the inaugural CIRS Qatar University Fellow for 2012-2013 and Assistant Professor of Special Education in the College of Education at Qatar University, delivered a CIRSFocused Discussion on “Policy Borrowing in Education: the Example of Inclusive Education in the Gulf” on February 19, 2013. Al-Hendawi began the lecture by noting that her interest in the topic came…
CIRS hosted a Focused Discussion featuring the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dr. Zlatko Lagumdžija. The event included an in-depth discussion of the Syrian conflict with senior diplomats and ambassadors, academics, and foreign policy analysts. Some of the topics of discussion included the course and direction of the Syrian conflict, the regional and international responses it has elicited, the pros and cons of outside military intervention in the conflict, and the rise in the scale of the refugees and the humanitarian disaster to which the conflict has given rise.
On March 12, 2013, CIRS organized a panel discussion on the topic of “War by Other Means?Iran under Sanctions,” featuring Mehran Kamrava, Director of CIRS; Mansoor Moaddel, CIRS Visiting Scholar; and Manata Hashemi, CIRS Postdoctoral Fellow. The objective of the panel was to have a discussion on the nature of the sanctions and their consequences…
On March 16–17, 2013, CIRS held a second working group to conclude its research initiative on “Social Change in Post-Khomeini Iran.” Experts and scholars from various multidisciplinary backgrounds reconvened in Doha to discuss their research findings and garner feedback on their individual paper submissions based on original areas of research that were discussed in the first working…
On Monday, April 1, 2013, CIRS hosted a talk by H. E. Bader Omar Al Dafa from the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Al Dafa is a career diplomat, and served as Qatar’s Ambassador to Egypt, the United States, France, and Russia. He was also the Undersecretary General to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA). H. E. Al Dafa is currently Ambassador-at-Large and also the Executive Director of the Global Dry Land Alliance. During his visit, Ambassador Al Dafa shared his experiences as a diplomat and commented on current trends in Qatari diplomacy related to regional developments.
On April 22, 2013, Daniel Lucey, Adjunct Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Georgetown University Medical Center and an expert on global virus outbreaks, delivered the final CIRS Monthly Dialogue of the 2012-2013 academic year. Titled “Global Travel and Virus Outbreaks 2003-2013,” the talk focused on past global outbreaks of respiratory diseases like SARS and H1N1, and a possible…
Rogaia Abusharaf, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar and CIRS Faculty Fellow 2012-2013, led a Focused Discussion on “Debating Darfur in the World” on April 24, 2013. The lecture focused on the narratives that have been used by the Sudanese government, Western media, and diaspora communities to make sense of…