MEI Post-Doctoral Research Fellow Dr. Marie Duboc presented last week at the Singapore Business Federation on “An Update of the Current Political and Economic Situation in Egypt.” The event is the first of a quarterly series—the MENA Insights Series—which is jointly organized by Singapore Business Federation’s Middle East Business Group (MEBG) and MEI. Duboc discussed [...]

In April 2013, MEI Post-Doctoral Fellow Navid Fozi-Abivard received a positive write-up of his 2011 dissertation, “Zoroastrians in Contemporary Tehran,” on the site Dissertation Reviews. Fozi-Abivard’s anthropological study explores the ways in which Zoroastrians currently living in Tehran construct their identity and historical consciousness in regard to the majority Shi’i culture. He finds that they do so [...]

By Nurhidayahti Mohammad Miharja
MEI Visiting Research Professor Peter Sluglett’s near-completed atlas of Islamic history provided the context for his recent discussion on “the end of Islamic history.” The full house event, held at Traders Hotel Singapore, was co-organized by MEI and MUIS (the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore).
Sluglett contends that it was no longer possible [...]

By Faeza Abdurazak and Nurhidayahti Mohammad Miharja
Early this month, MEI had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Larbi Sadiki, Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, for a double bill lecture on democratic transitions in Tunisia and Libya. In his first talk, “Elections with Democracy in Tunisia? Islamists vs Secularists and the [...]

By Faeza Abdurazak
National security expert Ali Soufan of the Soufan Group, an international strategic consultancy, spoke at MEI last month on “Trends, Threats, and Sanctuary Management in the MENA.” An emerging trend, Soufan observed, is that the al-Qaʿida “jihad” narrative is no longer contained to one specific place —it is now everywhere, fostering the need for [...]

By Nurhidayahti Mohammad Miharja
At the third MEI research seminar held last month, Visiting Research Professor Robert Bianchi led a discussion on the need for multipolarization in world politics that pushes for power sharing coalitions beyond that of a United States-China diarchy. The idea of this diarchy, he asserts, does not go far enough toward sharing [...]

By Faeza Abdurazak
In a seminar titled “GCC Outlook with a Focus on Dubai,” Dr. Brian Shegar, General Manager of Emirates NBD, stressed that the GCC-Asia Pacific economic nexus will grow in the years to come. Thanks to the region’s strong reserves, the GCC is highly dependent on the oil and gas sector, although it has [...]

By Nurhidayahti Mohammad Miharja and Faeza Abdurazak

MEI was honored to host nine world-renowned Middle East studies scholars in a two-part international colloquium on 7 March at the Hilton Singapore. After the welcome address by MEI Director Michael Hudson, the first session discussed the current state of Middle East studies, with special reference to Asia. [...]

MEI is proud to announce that the former finance minister for Iraq, Ali Allawi, will be joining us as a visiting research professor. Allawi graduated from MIT in 1968 with a BSc in civil engineering. He continued his postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics in regional planning, and he went on to obtain [...]