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Read the director’s message, explore the latest research news, discover upcoming events, and browse our recent publications. The Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies has commenced the autumn semester with a strong program of academic and outreach activities. The semester began with the launch of the new MECW project on satellite-based water monitoring in contexts of conflict and governance s

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/read-latest-cmes-newsletter-1 - 2025-10-17

CMES researcher Maria Småberg has recently published an article in The Conversation together with Johan Schar associate Senior fellow at SIPRI. In the hills of the southern West Bank, a Swedish cooking pot has become a symbol of trust, resilience and forgotten solidarity. Half a century after it was first distributed as emergency aid, the cooking pots still gleam in the kitchens of Beit Awwa – rem

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/cooking-pot-became-symbol-swedens-commitment-helping-palestine - 2025-10-17

Yemen is home to religious and sectarian minorities who represent about 0.5% of the total population. In addition to Muslims, there is a minority of Jews, who’s presence has drastically shrunk over the years due to the multiple violations and displacement they were subjected to. Yemen also has a Bahai minority, who are currently estimated to number around 2,000 individuals. They also have been sub

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/book-minorities-yemen-reality-and-challenges - 2025-10-17

Middle Eastern research news from Lund University. Words from the director: The covid-19 will transform the ways we work and socialize in a manner we can still not oversee. Already now most research and higher teaching are done by distance mode. Even so, many of the planned research activities and meetings during the spring have had to be cancelled or postponed. Also, the Middle East is preparing

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/middle-east-forum-newsletter-9-march-2020 - 2025-10-17

CyberOrient welcomes Anders Ackfeldt at Lund University in Sweden as a new Managing Editor along with Vit Sisler at Charles University. An expanded CyberOrient, an official open-access journal of the American Anthropological Association, is now up and ready for surfing. The renewed website, cyberorient.net, now has archived all past articles in PDF. CyberOrient is devoted to research on the impact

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/cmes-anders-ackfeldt-new-editor-journal-cyberorient - 2025-10-17

In January-February 2020, three researchers affiliated with CMES travelled to Khartoum, Sudan for the official kick-off seminar and workshop of a 3-year project that is funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR), FORMAS and SIDA and entitled: "Resilience in Urban Sudan (RUS): An Interdisciplinary Spatial and Temporal Study of Social Cohesion and Resilience to Tackle the Consequences of Climate an

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/cmes-affiliated-researchers-launch-climate-research-project-sudan - 2025-10-17

This book analyses the tensions that emerge within strong welfare states when faced with large migration flows. It also interrogates the phenomenon of the 2015 'refugee crisis' and its foreplay and aftermath in the context of Northern Europe and challenges the notion of crisis as a feature of contemporary realities. "With an eye to the daily strategies and experiences of newly settled populations,

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/new-book-refugees-and-violence-welfare-bureaucracies-northern-europe-edited-cmes-dalia-abdelhady-and - 2025-10-17

The rise of sectarianism in the Middle East and North Africa after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq has led to a new conceptual category – arguably as political as it is religious – which Rola El-Husseini has previously termed the ‘new Shi’a’. In this formulation, groups not traditionally associated with Twelver Shiism, such as the ‘Alawis of Syria or the Zaydis of Yemen, were suddenly deemed by jou

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/political-exigency-or-religious-affinity-sectarianism-contemporary-arab-world-new-article-cmes-rola - 2025-10-17

This article compares the discourses of building nations and national identities fostered in the content of school textbooks in the Republic of Turkey—a modern, territorial nation‐state—and the Autonomous Administration of North and East of Syria (hereafter Rojava)—an alternative state system model established in the power vacuum proceeding Bashar al‐Assad regime withdrawal from expansive territor

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/content-school-textbooks-nation-states-and-stateless-autonomies-comparison-turkey-and-autonomous - 2025-10-17

Middle Eastern research news from Lund University Message from the director The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is an exceptionally dynamic area that has undergone great changes politically as well as economically during the latest decades. The region is likely to continue to display rapid and sudden developments during coming decades. Demographically the region will almost double its populati

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/middle-east-forum-newsletter-8-february-2020 - 2025-10-17

An innovative project has received support from the Swedish Institute under its “support for cooperation with academics from Turkey” scheme. “Turkey Beyond Borders: Critical Voices, New Perspectives” aims to foster collaboration between academics in Sweden and scholars from Turkey whose academic freedoms are implicitly or explicitly curtailed and violated. The website is now launched, with 2 vodca

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/seminar-and-vodcast-series-draws-attention-infringements-academic-freedom-turkey-and-provides-forum - 2025-10-17

New article by CMES researcher Orwa Ajjoub in The Conflict Archives - a platform created to showcase work focused on conflict, insurgency and politics across the globe including the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and Central America. The website is a collection of news, articles, insights and analyses supported by in-depth analysis and research of contemporary conflict zones by several researcher

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/orwa-ajjoub-after-baghdadis-death-why-did-islamic-state-fighters-give-pledge-their-new-leader - 2025-10-17

New article by CMES Mohammed Almahfali & James Root in The Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies - an independent think-tank that seeks to foster change through knowledge production with a focus on Yemen and the surrounding region. The Center’s publications and programs, offered in both Arabic and English, cover political, social, economic and security related developments, aiming to impact policy l

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/how-irans-islamic-revolution-does-and-does-not-influence-houthi-rule-northern-yemen - 2025-10-17

Having just marked two months since its launch, #rethinkingPopulism has already published 9 articles and an interactive map tracing the topography of research on populism and gender. Continuing to pursue the project’s aim to contribute to a vigorous and constructive, yet widely accessible debate for a non-academic and younger public as well as populism researchers, #rethinkingPopulism has now prod

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/research-populism-published-cartoons - 2025-10-17

Maria Malmström (Lund) discussed her latest monograph The Streets are Talking to Me: Affective Fragments in Sisi’s Egypt with Professor Omar Dewachi (from Rutgers). Professor Maria Malmström is Associate Professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University, where she, in January 2017, started a collaborative research project The Materiality of Suspicion and the Ambiguity of the Fa

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/book-talk-graduate-center-city-university-new-york-maria-f-malmstrom - 2025-10-17

18 March 2020, @ 15:00 CMES, Lund University, Finngatan 16 Please register here: maria.lofstedt@cme.lu.se Speakers:Pınar Dinç, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University“Turkey's Unchanging Raison d'État? Narratives on Dersim 1938”Reyda Ergün, Faculty of Law, Kadir Has University,“Raison d’État and the Regimes of Gender and Sexuality in Turkey under the AKP rule”Burak Özçetin, Faculty of C

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/panel-discussion-raison-detat-new-turkey-postponed - 2025-10-17

CMES affiliated fellow, Joshka Wessels, talked about her book “Documenting Syria; Revolution, Filmmaking and Video Activism” recently published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury. Syria is now one of the most important countries in the world for the international documentary film industry. The most recent Syria documentary film “For Sama” is nominated for the 2020 Oscars and has become the most BAFTA nominat

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/documenting-syria-revolution-filmmaking-and-video-activism-full-house-seminar - 2025-10-17

A desire to be able to freely carry out research and the chance to provide her daughter with a good education led Pinar Dinc to leave Turkey. It is a journey that is not over yet.   However, with another prestigious research grant from Formas she feels secure in Lund for the next three years.  “I would be able to begin research on anything at all in Turkey, however, if I were to present results th

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/she-found-sanctuary-lund-about-cmes-pinar-dinc-and-her-research-and-life-journey - 2025-10-17

New article by CMES guest researcher Shada Abdulaziz. An efficient routing using a virtual backbone (VB) network is one of the most significant improvements in the wireless sensor network (WSN). One promising method for selecting this subset of network nodes is by finding the minimum connected dominating set (MCDS), where the searching space for finding a route is restricted to nodes in this MCDS.

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/adaptive-scatter-search-solve-minimum-connected-dominating-set-problem-efficient-management-wireless - 2025-10-17

Vad är de regionala konsekvenserna efter mordet på den iranska generalen Qassem Soleimani och det upptrappade läget mellan USA och Iran? Spyros A. Sofos, forskare vid Centrum för Mellanösternstudier, kommenterar läget.     Read more here 2020-01-30  

https://www.cmes.lu.se/article/mordet-pa-soleimani-kan-fa-stora-konsekvenser - 2025-10-17