On January 18, 2009, CIRS began the 2008-2009 spring semester with a Monthly Dialogue lecture entitled “Democrats and Autocrats, Shi’ites and Sunnis: Political Reform and Confessional Identities in Bahrain” given by its Postdoctoral Fellow Katja Niethammer. Niethammer’s lecture is part of a larger study undertaken in her PhD research and analyzes the differences in goals, strategies and behavior…
Journalist and opinion-writer Mona Eltahawy was invited by CIRS to give a lunchtime lecture at the SFS-Qatar campus on the subject of “Female Suicide Bombers in Iraq.” Eltahawy is an award-winning syndicated columnist and an international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues. Her opinion pieces have been published frequently in the International Herald Tribune,The Washington…
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, currently University Professor of Islamic Studies at the George Washington University, Washington D.C., is one of the most important and foremost scholars of Islamic, Religious and Comparative Studies in the world today. Author of over fifty books and five hundred articles which have been translated into several major Islamic, European and Asian languages, Professor Nasr is a well known and highly respected intellectual figure both in the West and the Islamic world.
Nur Yalman, Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at the Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, gave a CIRS Focused Discussion on February 8, 2010 on the topic of “Turkey’s Transformation: Regional Implications.” Yalman was invited to Doha by GU-Qatar Professor Mark Farha on whose PhD thesis Yalman served as an advisor. The lecture was attended…
Ibrahim M. Oweiss, Professor of Economics at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, gave the February CIRS Monthly Dialogue lecture on the subject of “Current Economic Global Depression: Causes and Effects With Reference to the Gulf Economies.” Oweiss began the talk by noting that he refers to the current economic crisis as…
On March 10, 2009, a Monthly Dialogue entitled “International Power Realignment in the Gulf” was given by Mehran Kamrava, Director of the Center for International and Regional Studies and an expert on Iran and the Persian Gulf. The Dialogue was attended by Georgetown faculty, students, staff, and invited guests. Kamrava’s Monthly Dialogue informed the audience about “how changing dynamics in the Gulf are resulting in…
Drawing on his career of experience as a diplomat, former U.S. ambassador to Syria and Israel, Edward Djerejian, offered his insights and analysis of current foreign policy challenges facing the United States in the Middle East and South Asia to a full house at the Diplomatic Club in Doha on March 17, 2009. Ambassador Djerejian,…
On April 7, 2009, Mark Farha, Visiting Assistant Professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, was invited by CIRS to give the April Monthly Dialogue on the subject of “Lebanon as the Mirror of Arab Politics.” Farha began by noting that the “sheer number of civil society organizations, the amount of political activism,…
Former Egyptian Ambassador to the United States Nabil Fahmy gave his analysis and insight into the foreign policy challenges facing the United States and the Arab world in a speech at the Diplomatic Club in Doha on April 29, 2009. Fahmy stressed the inter-connectedness of the challenges facing the region and suggested that developments on…
on May 3–4, 2009, the "Comparative Ethics of War" working group meeting was co-sponsored by the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) and the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO). The meeting, which took place in Doha, is part of a larger research initiative undertaken by PRIO. The research group met twice previously, in Stresa, Italy in…
James Onley, the 2008–2009 CIRS Senior Fellow and Director of the Gulf Studies program at the University of Exeter, delivered the May Monthly Dialogue lecture entitled “Agents of Empire: Britain’s Local Representatives in the Gulf, 1750s–1950s” on May 4, 2009. Onley began by explaining that the lecture was part of a larger study he conducted towards a book he authored entitled The…
On May 16–17, 2009, CIRS convened the first of its working group meetings with its research grant program dedicated to the study of migrant labor issues in the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The working group was comprised of twenty international and local participants from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, political science, sociology, and…