Featured Projects

Global Energy Cultures:

How Energy Shapes Our Everyday Lives

December 9-10, 2023

Msheireb Museums

Doha, Qatar

In collaboration with Msheireb Museums, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) is hosting a forum on “Global Energy Cultures: How Energy Shapes our Everyday Lives.” Every aspect of our contemporary lives is shaped by energy; societies are fully dependent on the accessibility and availability of energy products, whether in the form of hydrocarbons or alternative energy sources. At the intersection of academic and artistic perspectives, scholars, artists, and practitioners engage in discussions around the broad theme of “energy.” The aim of the conversations is to make academic research accessible to the public through a series of multidisciplinary talks and cultural events.

Afghanistan Regional Symposium: Confronting the Impasse

November 11, 2023

Four Seasons Hotel Doha

The Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) is hosting the “Afghanistan Regional Symposium: Confronting the Impasse.” The symposium gathers leading experts, scholars, and policymakers in a collective pursuit of exploring and addressing the intricate challenges surrounding Afghanistan and its neighboring region. Since the Taliban regained power in 2021, there has been an unsettling impasse between Afghanistan and the rest of the world. This impasse presents a critical juncture where conventional strategies of intervention from global powers have become inadequate. Through insightful panels, including discussions on the Afghan peace process, climate change, food security challenges, education, and humanitarian concerns, the symposium fosters a nuanced understanding of ongoing challenges and paves the way for informed impactful solutions.

Live Arabic Translation will be Available

Conference

The Invasion of Iraq: Regional Reflections

September 14, 15 and 16, 2023

Four Seasons Hotel

Doha, Qatar

The 2003 invasion of Iraq marked a critical turning point in America’s relationship with Iraq and its neighboring countries, a region of strategic importance encompassing vital energy and military interests, and reshaped its diplomatic relations worldwide. This conference is convened by the Dean of Georgetown University in Qatar, Dr. Safwan Masri, in collaboration with the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS). Taking a regional perspective, this meeting provides an opportunity to reflect on the many geopolitical and socioeconomic consequences of the conflict that continue to reverberate across the globe twenty years later. We invite you to join the conversation.

Featured image of the project

Migrant Voices in Qatar

This podcast series, which features participants from a number of African and Asian sending countries, seeks to give migrants in Qatar an opportunity to tell their stories, in their own words and in their own way. While each of the episodes in this podcast chronicles an individual’s unique experiences, it is also representative of a much larger story—the story of millions of temporary labor migrants living and working all around the world.

 

Energy Humanities

The Energy Humanities initiative is part of the Environmental Studies research cluster at the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar.

Led by GU-Q faculty members Professor Victoria GoogasianProfessor Trish Kahle, and Professor Firat Oruc, the initiative aims to generate new scholarly conversations on the importance of everyday energetic life to the study of energy’s past, present, and future. Its goal is to facilitate the emergence of a new focus on energy as everyday lived experience, in order to add complexity and texture to the narratives within the field that have primarily focused on questions of state-building, international relations, economic development, and technological systems. Through close examinations of the relationship between energy, society, and culture from a comparative and transnational perspective, this research initiative calls for new ways of thinking about how we govern energy, how we communicate about it, how we understand the relationship between energy flows and social, cultural, political, and economic forms, and how we understand ordinary people’s encounters with energy in and beyond the nation-state. Examining questions related to the importance of everyday energetic life through the lens of history, anthropology, literature, film, cultural studies, science, and political studies the project will identify new multidisciplinary directions for the global energy humanities. 

TEN YEARS ON: MASS PROTESTS AND UPRISINGS IN THE ARAB WORLD

The Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar is part of the Ten Years On consortium that includes over a dozen academic institutions and research centers..

December 17, 2020 marked the tenth anniversary of the start of the Arab uprisings in Tunisia. Beginning in 2011, mass uprisings swept North Africa and the Middle East, spreading from the shores of Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and the Eastern Province of the Arabian Peninsula. A “second wave” of mass protests and uprisings manifested during 2019 in Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon, and Iraq. The persistence of demands for popular sovereignty even in the face of re-entrenched authoritarianism, imperial intervention, and civil strife is a critical chapter in regional and global history.

In an effort to mark, interrogate, and reflect on the Arab uprisings, the Arab Studies Institute in collaboration with Princeton’s Arab Barometer, and George Mason’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program, and other academic institutions, launched a year-long set of events, reflections, and conversations. The aim of the project is to produce resources for educators, researchers, students, and journalists to understand the last decade of political upheaval historically and in the lived present.