Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World

in partnership with

the Al-Saba Programme

Event Date: 12-13 March 2012

Durham University, United Kingdom

The Arab Spring: Between Authoritarianism and Revolution

The recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) represent an unprecedented political shift in the Arab world. The long standing regimes in Tunisia and Egypt were toppled by massive popular protests; the regimes in Bahrain, Yemen and Syria are all experiencing popular challenges from below; and the NATO-backed revolt in Libya ended the rule of Muammar Qaddafi. At the same time, most of the regimes ruling the region contain many of the same actors that were part of the previous ruling elites.

This two day event has been organised to discuss the historical transformations in the MENA region and identify the nature and direction of social and political change in the region. The panels will discuss the factors leading to the revolts, the nature of social and political change underway in the MENA region, the consequences of domestic political changes for the regional balance of power and the responses of the international community, notably the European Union and the United States to these changes. An underlying theme is the role theory plays in both making sense of these changes, and in impeding our understanding.

Questions that would be considered by the speakers include the following:

Can the Arab Spring be understood as a singular phenomenon or should it be understood as a series of disparate struggles with different objectives, different structural drivers and different sources of material and ideological support?

What factors and processes enabled public dissent against the regimes in the MENA region to erupt so forcefully at this particular juncture? How can theories of social protest help us make sense of these events and how do these events challenge existing theories?

What has been the outcome of the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya?

What is the nature of the social and political conflict in Bahrain, Yemen and Syria?

What has been the response of the major regional powers such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey and Iran to the Arab Spring? How has the Arab Spring affected the balance of power among these regional players?

How have the major global actors reacted to the changes under way in the region, and what has been the role of the Western states in shaping and influencing developments in the region?

Day 1 (March 12)

08:30-09:15 Registration, Coffee/Tea

Welcome by Professor Anoush Ehteshami (Durham) .

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Explaining the Arab Spring

Dr Angela Joya (York University, Canada/SGIA, Durham)
Understanding the Syrian Crisis

[AUDIO HERE]

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Dr Jeroen Gunning (SGIA, Durham)
Enabling a Revolution: Networks, structures and protest waves in the lead-up to the Egyptian Revolution

[AUDIO HERE]

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Dr Roel Meijer(Clingendael/Radboud University of Nijmegen)
The Transitional period in Egypt and Tunisia compared

[AUDIO HERE]

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Dr Noël Brehony (MENAS Consulting)
Yemen and the Arab Spring

[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 1 discussion

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Domestic Impact of the Arab Spring

Ahmed Tohamy (Durham)
Domestic Impact of the Arab Spring in Egypt

[AUDIO HERE]

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Dr Kristian Ulrichsen (London School of Economics)
Domestic Impact of the Arab Spring in Saudi Arabia

[AUDIO HERE]

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Professor Emma Murphy (Durham)
Domestic Impact of the Arab Spring in Tunesia

[AUDIO HERE]

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Dima Smaira (Durham)
Domestic Impact of the Arab Spring in Lebanon

[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 2 discussion

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Political Islam in Power

Dr Ewan Stein (University of Edinburgh)
Dynamics of Political Islam in the region

[AUDIO HERE]

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Khalil al-Anani (Durham)
Islamists in Power: Prospects and Challenges – The Muslim Brothers And Political Salafism In Egypt

[AUDIO HERE]

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Dr Maha Azam (Chatham House) - Egypt and the region

[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 3 discussion

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The Arab Spring and non-Arab Regional States

Dr Özlem Tür (Middle East Technical University, Ankara)
The Arab Spring and non-Arab Regional States: Turkey

[AUDIO HERE]

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Professor Anoush Ehteshami (Durham)
The Arab Spring and non-Arab Regional States: Iran

[AUDIO HERE]

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Professor Clive Jones (University of Leeds)
The Arab Spring and non-Arab Regional States:Israel

[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 4 discussion

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Day 2 (March 13)

Keynote Address (Chair – Professor John Dumbrell)

Professor Steven Heydemann (USIP and Georgetown University) – The End of Authoritarianism?

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Discussant – Professor Jim Piscatori (Durham)

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Audience questions

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Balance of Power
(Chair – Anoush Ehteshami)

Dr Steven Wright (Qatar University) – Balance of Power: Qatar

[AUDIO HERE]

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Dr Chris Davidson (Durham) – Balance of Power: UAE

[AUDIO HERE]

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Dr Mahjoob Zweiri (Qatar University) – Transitional Shiíism

[AUDIO HERE]

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Dr Abdullah Baabood (Cambridge University)- Regional Perspectives

[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 6 discussion

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International Perspectives
(Chair  - Christopher Davidson)

Dr Christian Schweiger (Durham) – International Perspectives: the EU

[AUDIO HERE]

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Professor Rosemary Hollis (City University London) – International Perspectives: R2P

[AUDIO HERE]

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Professor Caroline Kennedy-Pipe (University of Hull) – International Perspectives: the US

[AUDIO HERE]

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Respondent: Professor David Held (Durham) – The Responsibility to Protect

[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 7 discussion

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Closing Remarks Professor Anoush Ehteshami (Durham) .

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Godfrey Merlin (Freelance researcher and activist, Galapagos)
Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf

talk:

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questions:

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Rose Cairns (University of Leeds)
Social barriers to the generation and implementation of appropriate biosecurity policies in Galapagos 

talk:

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questions:

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accompanying images:

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Dr Simon Goodman (University of Leeds)

talk:

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questions:

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Keynote Presentation:

Professor Daniel Simberloff (University of Tennessee-Knoxville)
Non-Native Species Risk: When, Where and to Whose Interests?

talk:

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questions:

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Kezia Barker
Surveilling and Preventing Possible Biosecurity Futures

talk:

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questions:

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accompanying images:

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Niall Moore (Head of Non-Native Species Secretariat) 

talk:

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questions:

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accompanying images:

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Jeff Waage
Future bioinvasions – viewing future risk from different sectors and cultures

talk:

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questions:

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accompanying images:

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Event Date: 21 – 22 February 2011
The River Room
King’s College London, Strand Campus
London WC2R 2LS

Problematising Danger

ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security

Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Network,
the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University
and the Centre for International Relations, Department of War Studies, King’s College London

Download workshop package here

“There is no liberalism without a culture of danger.” (Foucault)

Threats and risks have become the preferred categories for imagining contemporary security. Practices such as defence, border control and the surveillance of populations, insurance, risk profiling to identify suspicious subjects, and risk assessments to protect objects and systems such as critical infrastructure, rely heavily on well-established paradigms of security. Discourses and practices of threats and risks, with their allied technologies of measurement and calculation, however, relate to the wider problem of danger and its allied concept of ‘uncertainty’. Thinking ‘danger’ relates to understandings of uncertainties, otherness of being, and spaces and environments of protection in excess of those accounted for in the language and metrics of discourses of threats and risks.

What happens, then, if the analysis of security resorts to understandings of ‘danger’, ‘dangerousness’, and processes of ‘endangerment’? Is it possible to think security by referring ideas of danger to understandings of life, livelihoods and lifestyles, instead of ready-made ‘objects’ of security such as sovereignty, territory, the nation-state, citizens, borders, and sociological categories such as class and gender? Is it possible to think security in relation to danger away from utilitarian economic categories such as cost-benefit analysis, risk calculus, and rational choice?

The workshop aims to explore these questions and to challenge participants to wonder if current policy security priorities such as terrorism, climate change, weapons proliferation, resilience and migration can be thought in relation to ‘danger’ outside discourses of threats and risks.

In the first three workshops of this seminar series we began to explore an agenda for contemporary biopolitical security research around problems such as mobilities and circulations, resilience, values and processes of valuations in relation to the technologies through which lifestyles and livelihoods are treated as referents of security. In this fourth workshop we intend to spark a conversation around the implications of thinking dangerousness in relation to security and life.

The workshop is based on participants’ work and invites a reflection on the following questions:

- How are ideas of danger constituted? What forms of ‘data’, ‘information’, and ‘knowledge’ are involved in constituting a dangerous subject or a dangerous environment?

- What are the preconditions for understanding endangerment in and how do they question the ‘new security challenges’ of for example, terrorism (and cyber-terrorism), proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and health pandemics?

- Can discourses and practices of security be different if reflections on the consequences of endangerment are advanced?

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Programme:

MONDAY 21 FEBRUARY

Luis Lobo-Guerrero and Vivienne Jabri – Introduction

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Panel 1 – Ontologisations of Danger

• Btihaj Ajana – Re-ontologising Danger (AUDIO HERE)
• Joscha Wullweber – Strategies of Danger and Dangerous Strategies (AUDIO HERE)
• David Chandler – The Ontology of Danger:Recasting the Human Subject in Discourses of Vulnerability and Resilience (AUDIO HERE)
• Andrew Neal – The Entropy of Dangerousness (AUDIO HERE)

Chair: Martin Coward (Newcastle University)

discussion:

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Panel 2 – Risk managing the dangerousness of terror

• Cerelia Athanassiou – Changing the Global War on Terror: Who is the ‘Ready’ Citizen Arming Against? (AUDIO HERE)
• Lisa Stampnitzky- Constituting terrorism: three attempts at rational governance (AUDIO HERE)
• Christopher Zebrowski – Falling-out: Examining the problematising capacities of danger (AUDIO HERE)
• Jonas Hagmann – Risk registers and the measurement of everything: Security scientism and the reassertion of modernism (AUDIO HERE)

Chair: Claudia Aradau (The Open University)

discussion:

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Panel 3 – Danger’s Otherness

• Debbie Lisle – Danger’s Other: Pleasure, Leisure & Travel (AUDIO HERE)
• Sam Okoth Opondo – Fearscapes / Securescapes : Urban Anxieties, Securities and the Domestic Scene (AUDIO HERE)

Chair: Vivienne Jabri

discussion:

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Keynote Address:

Professor Marieke de Goede
Networked Danger and Speculative Security (AUDIO HERE)

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TUESDAY 22 February

Panel 4 – Sites, spaces and strategies of endangerment

• Charlotte Heath-Kelly – Counter-Terrorism and the Counterfactual: Producing the ‘Radicalisation’ Discourse and the UK PREVENT strategy (AUDIO HERE)
• Casey McNeill – Danger and un-governed spaces in the US (AUDIO HERE)
• Alex Hamilton – ‘Dangerous tools’ in ‘dangerous hands’: How synthetic biology is imagined as a ‘bioterrorist threat’ (AUDIO HERE)

Chair: Peter Adey

discussion:

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Final Roundtable and Conclusions With:

• Mustapha Pasha (University of Aberdeen)
• Marieke de Goede (University of Amsterdam)
• Luis Lobo-Guerrero (Keele University)
• Vivienne Jabri (King’s College London)
• Martin Coward (Newcastle University)

discussion:

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