Rising Insecurities in the Middle East and North Africa

The UI Podcast

What does the recent wave of protests across the MENA reveal about the status of state-society relations in the region? Are there communalities between the recent waves of uprisings? How are states and established regimes reacting to rising domestic insecurities? The recent wave of popular protests that has spread through the region during 2019 has threatened to upset the status quo and established regimes once again. At the very least, they show that the spark ignited by the 2011 Arab Uprisings is far from having been extinguished. Almost nine years later, protests in Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq and Algeria reveal that socio-political relations are under contestation once again, with people in the MENA calling for the fall of regimes and deep structural change. In this seminar we bring together experts on a variety of countries with the aim of making sense of the grievances behind the recent protests and investigate what this means for authoritarian regimes and the geopolitics of the region as a whole. Speakers: Dalia Ghanem, Resident Scholar, Carnegie Middle East Center. Dylan O’Driscoll, Researcher in the Governance and Society Programme at SIPRI. The seminar was moderated by Lucia Ardovini, Research Fellow at UI’s Middle East and North Africa Programme. The discussion: Uprisings, protests and state-society relations in the MENA-region https://soundcloud.com/user-312634401/uprisings-protests-and-state-society-relations-in-the-mena-region