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The programme (updated 14 November 2010) can be downloaded as a pdf file here.
Contact Dr James Onley at j.onley@exeter.ac.uk with any questions about the programme
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Friday, 12 November 2010
PRINCES, BROKERS, AND BUREAUCRATS: OIL AND THE STATE IN SAUDI ARABIA, a lecture and book launch by Dr Steffen Hertog
of the LSE. Sponsored by the Society for Arabian Studies and the LSE Kuwait Programme.
5:30pm in room G2 at SOAS. Drinks reception following the talk in room G3.
Abstract: Steffen Hertog’s recently-published Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats (Cornell University Press, 2010) is
the most thorough treatment of the political economy of Saudi Arabia to date. It uncovers an untold history of how the
elite rivalries and whims of half a century ago have shaped today's Saudi state and are reflected in its policies.
Starting in the late 1990s, Saudi Arabia embarked on an ambitious reform campaign to remedy its long-term economic stagnation.
The results have been puzzling for both area specialists and political economists: Saudi institutions have not failed across
the board, as theorists of the 'rentier state' would predict, nor have they achieved the all-encompassing modernization the
regime has touted. Instead, the kingdom has witnessed a bewildering mélange of thorough failures and surprising successes.
Hertog argues that it is traits peculiar to the Saudi state that make sense of its uneven capacities. Oil rents since World
War II have shaped Saudi state institutions in ways that are far from uniform. Oil money has given regime elites unusual
leeway for various institutional experiments in different parts of the state: in some cases creating massive rent-seeking
networks deeply interwoven with local society; in others large but passive bureaucracies; in yet others insulated islands
of remarkable efficiency. This process has fragmented the Saudi state into an uncoordinated set of vertically divided fiefdoms.
Case studies of foreign investment reform, labor market nationalization and WTO accession reveal how this oil-funded
apparatus enables swift and successful policy-making in some policy areas, but produces coordination and regulation
failures in others.
Biography: Dr Steffen Hertog is a Lecturer in the Department of Government at the LSE. He was previously Kuwait Professor
at Sciences Po Paris and a Lecturer in the School of Government and International Affairs at the University of Durham.
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Wednesday, 8 December 2010
BELHAVEN OF ARABIA: THE SCOTTISH LORD WHO LOVED THE MOUNTAIN ARABS, a lecture by Trevor Mostyn. Sponsored by
the Society for Arabian Studies and the British-Yemeni Society.
6:00pm at SOAS (Khalili Lecture Theatre)
Abstract: This is the story of a man who was beguiled by the mountain tribes, in part, because he associated them
with the Scottish highlanders. Robert Udney Hamilton, later Lord Belhaven and Stenton, was a culturally sensitive figure
who served with the Aden Protectorate Levies during 1931–34 and the Colonial Service in the Aden Protectorate during 1934-46.
He recorded his vivid, penetrating and often very funny experiences in The Kingdom of Melchior: Adventure in South-West
Arabia (1949) and The Uneven Road (1955). While in Aden, he developed an interest in Yemen’s ancient history and organized
an archeological excavation at Shabwa, later presenting some of the antiquities he found to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford
in 1954. Trevor Mostyn will bring to life this charming, amusing and self-deprecating man who neglected his castles in
Scotland to share the rough and tumble of Yemeni tribal and mountain life.
Biography: Trevor Mostyn is a reporter, author, and publisher. In 1965, he hitchhiked from Britain to India via Iran
and Afghanistan before returning to read Arabic and Persian at Edinburgh University. He has lived in Saudi Arabia, Algeria,
and Egypt. He was The Tablet’s Middle East correspondent for ten years. In Cairo he was deputy correspondent for the
Financial Times. He was also Macmillan Publishers’ Middle East manager, travelling throughout the region for several
years, before founding MEED (Middle East Economic Digest) Books. He is the author of eight books on the Middle East,
including Coming of Age in the Middle East (1987), Egypt's Belle Epoque (1989), Censorship in Islamic Societies (2002).
His latest book, The Girl from Katamon, a novel set in the Palestine Mandate, will be published in February.
He is married to Lord Belhaven’s grand-daughter.
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Thursday, 13 January 2011
COSMOLOGY AND COMMERCE IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST, a lecture by Dr David Wengrow of University College London. Held in conjunction
with the Council for British Research in the Levant and the Palestine Exploration Fund.
6:00pm in the Stevenson Lecture Theatre, British Museum
Abstract: It was through contact with their gods that the ancient societies of the Middle East expressed their uniqueness,
their distinct attachments to land, origins, and place. Yet in the temples of Mesopotamia and Egypt, the earthly bodies
of the gods were ritually manufactured, nourished, and cared for in similar ways, using similar materials that could not
be found locally in either area. In seeking to understand the roots of cultural difference—the distinctive ‘forms’ of
Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization—we are therefore drawn into a world of mixtures and borrowings, in which the neighbouring
regions of Arabia and the Levant played pivotal roles. Dr. Wengrow's lecture will explore the cultural forces that bound together
the Bronze Age societies of the Near East, and how those connections force us to rethink the nature and evolution of 'early civilizations'.
His talk will be based upon arguments presented in his new book: What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West
(Oxford University Press, 2010), copies of which will be on sale at the venue.
Biography: Dr David Wengrow is Reader in Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.
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Thursday, 28 April 2011
ANCIENT DILMUN: THE EARLIEST STATE IN ARABIA AND THE VAST MOUND CEMETERIES IN BAHRAIN, by Steffen Terp Laursen of the Moesgaard Museum, Denmark.
Co-sponsored by the Bahrain Society. Organised in association with the London Middle East Institute, SOAS.
5:30pm in the Khalili Lecture Theatre, SOAS
Abstract: Humankind’s earliest-known written accounts record how the Dilmun state played and important role in Sumerian commerce and mythology.
The Dilmun state emerged around 2000 BC, centred on Bahrain. At its height, its culture stretched from Bahrain in the south,
to Kuwait in the north, and the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia in the west. Steffen Laursen will present fascinating archaeological evidence – art,
temples, settlements, and the famous Dilmun burial mounds – to shed light on the remarkable early history of Bahrain.
Biography: Steffen Terp Laurse is an archaeologist at the Moesgaard Museum, Denmark and a PhD candidate in Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Aarhus.
He is the author of numerous papers on the burial mounds of Bahrain.
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Wednesday, 25 May 2011
THE BFSA ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING, followed immediately by the lecture listed below.
6:00pm in the Khalili Lecture Theatre, SOAS
LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY IN THE ARABIAN GULF, a lecture by Professor Clive Holes of the University of Oxford.
Organised in association with the London Middle East Institute, SOAS.
Abstract: Over the last fifty years, the Arabian Gulf has, little by little, taken on a regional identity that to some degree now supercedes that of the states that
compose it. Politically, this was symbolised in the mid-1980s by the formation of the GCC. More recently, at grass-roots level, the forces of
internationalisation and globalisation have brought radical change to social relationships, employment patterns and family structures. This lecture highlights
the effects these changes are having on the relationship between language and identity in the Gulf, and pays particular attention to three phenomena: the
recession of local linguistic identities in favour of regional ones; the spread of global English; and pidginisation as a consequence of labour migration
from South Asia. One of the consequences of the latter two phenomena is a widespread anxiety at government level about the very survival of Arabic as a
national language, particularly among the upcoming generations.
Biography: Clive Holes is Khalid bin Abdullah Al Sa'ud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow
of Magdalen College. His current main fields of research are the evolution of the contemporary Arabic language, written and spoken, and Arabic popular
poetry as a form of social commentary and political dissent.
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