Digital Rights and Big Tech in MENA

What does the era of ‘big data’ mean for development technologies in MENA? How can data be used for good, to ensure projects working with vulnerable communities such as informal workers and women are seen and supported? What kind of repercussions does poor data collection have on emerging technologies? How can data-driven research and technology improve prospects for the next generation in the region seeking work, and what does it mean for the future of labour in the region? These are some of the questions we posed to Nagla Rizk, Professor of Economics at the American University in Cairo in episode 8. Nagla is Professor of Economics and Founding Director of the Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) at the American University in Cairo’s School of Business. Nagla’s area of research, teaching and advocacy is the economics of knowledge, technology and development, with focus on governance of responsible data and Artificial Intelligence, fair work in the platform economy, innovation, gender and inclusion in Egypt, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Writer and art critic, Rahel Aima, who grew up and currently lives in Dubai, talks to us about living in the Gulf, a region rapidly developing itself as the place to be for smart cities and high-tech living. Rahel explores a concept she has been thinking about for some time, the Khaleeji Ideology, which meets at the intersection of technology, economy, the environment and nation building, as a way of understanding developments in the contemporary Gulf. This episode also features comment from Michael Mason, Director of the LSE Middle East Centre and Professor of Environmental Geography at LSE, who explores the rise of “progressive” urban development projects in the Gulf, and whether technology can be the solution to pressing environmental challenges of our time. Rahel Aima is a writer, critic, and editor from Dubai. She writes about art, technology and the Gulf. Her work has been published in Artforum, Artnews, ArtReview, The Atlantic, Bookforum, frieze, Mousse and Vogue Arabia, amongst others. Read Rahel’s ‘The Khaleeji Ideology’ here: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/horizons/498319/the-khaleeji-ideology/.

This event, co-organised with LSE IDEAS, was the launch of the special issue ‘Arab Constitutional Responses to the Revolutions and Transformations in the Region’ published in the Journal of Constitutional Law in the Middle East and North Africa. The special issue is the result of a two year collaboration between the Carnegie Corporation, the Arab Association of Constitutional Law, and LSE. In the issue, 22 Arab scholars and experts have worked together to investigate the constitutional responses to the Arab Spring in ten different Arab countries including Bahrain, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and many more. The case studies examined in this special issue explore both the opportunities that were raised by the prospect of a constitutional change in the wake of the Arab Spring, as well as the many challenges they faced. Meet the Speakers Rim Turkmani is a Senior Policy Fellow at the LSE, based at the LSE Middle East Centre and LSE IDEAS. She is the Principal Investigator of the 'Legitimacy and Civicness in the Arab World' research project. Her research focuses on legitimate governance in the Middle East with an emphasis on constitutional legitimacy and local conflict and peace drivers. Nathan J. Brown is a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Among his works are The Rule of Law in the Arab World and Constitutions in a Non Constitutional World. Tamara El Khoury is the Executive Director of the Arab Association of Constitutional Law, Editor of the Journal of Constitutional Law in the Middle East and North Africa, and a constitutional expert at the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and the Rule of Law. She has been involved in constitutional and institutional reform processes in Libya, Jordan, Mali, Somalia, and South Sudan, working extensively with both institutional actors and civil society organizations. Tamara teaches Constitutional Law at IE University in Madrid. Azza Kamel Maghur is a Libyan lawyer, human rights activist, and constitutional law expert. Azza is known for defending political prisoners, advocating for human rights , including women’s rights, NGOs, and openly calling for a constitution in Libya. She spearheaded a legal committee to draft the law concerning NGOs and worked on further legislations, including the election law of 2012. Azza has published numerous legal articles in both Arabic and English.

Nearly ten years since the onset of the crisis in Yemen this discussion provided an in-depth assessment of the conflict over the past decade. Panellists examined the local origins of the war, the humanitarian catastrophe that has ensued, and the challenges for sustainable development given the prolonged violence. Regional dynamics fueling the crisis were also analysed, including factors related to the war in Gaza. With the March 2024 milestone approaching, speakers assessed stalled peace efforts and policy options for international stakeholders moving forward. Ahmed Al Khameri is the Team Leader for the FCDO-funded programme, The Yemen Support Fund at Chemonics UK. Most recently, he was the governance advisor under the DFID Yemen team leading DFID’s stabilization and governance efforts. Marwa Baabbad is Director of the Yemen Policy Centre. She is a researcher and development consultant with over ten years of experience working in the fields of community engagement, gender, peace and security, and youth political inclusion. Andreas Krieg is Associate Professor at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London and a Fellow at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies. Andreas is the Director of MENA analytica – a political risk firm – that works on Yemen and the Horn of Africa. Greg Shapland is an independent researcher, writer and consultant on politics, security, resources and environment (including water) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Greg is also a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre. From 1979 until 2015, he served in the MENA Research Group in the FCO.

How can art complicate claims of progress, innovation and the use of rapidly developing emerging technologies in MENA? In this episode, Cima Chehab speaks to visual artist Nadim Choufi about how he incorporates technology into his artwork both as subject matter and as medium. In the conversation, they discuss Nadim’s own artistic practice, his use of “lecture performances” and the question of whether life is truly enhanced by progress and technology, which is one of the main questions that underpins his work. Nadim also explores emerging art in the Middle East and how technology has transformed a new generation of artists – from digital illustrations to meme accounts. Nadim is a visual artist living in Beirut. He primarily focuses on the material histories and futures of innovation and desire, their social and political driving forces, and the visual and literary practices that surround them. He is a 2024 resident at the Jan van Eyck Academy. Currently he is the curator of the film programme of the 2024 festival edition of transmediale and a researcher at Haven For Artists. Previously he was co-Programs Director at Beirut Art Center. https://nadimchoufi.com/

Majd Al-Shihabi of 'Palestine Open Maps' and Sana Yazigi of the 'Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution' talk to us about how they have centered their archiving processes around maps, and what digital archiving can do for Palestinian and Syrian community-building. This episode also features comment from Dr Sara Salem and Dr Mai Taha of LSE, who explore the importance of creative archiving through their project 'Archive Stories'. Note: this episode was recorded before October 7, 2023. Majd Al-Shihabi is a technologist turned urban planner, turned technologisturbanplanner. Majd is co-founder of Palestine Open Maps, a platform for searching, navigating, downloading and digitizing historical maps of Palestine. Majd was the inaugural Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellow which enabled him to start Palestine Open Maps. https://palopenmaps.org/en Sana Yazigi is a graphic designer and cultural activist. She is the founder of Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, a project that documents all types of creative expressions produced since the Syrian Revolution in 2011 until the present day. She is also the founder of The Cultural Diary, Syria's first bilingual monthly cultural agenda (2007-2012). https://creativememory.org/ https://archive-stories.com/

This event was the launch Zoe Hurley's new book 'Social Media Influencing in the City of Likes: Dubai and the Postdigital Condition'. Evaluating the cases of multiple influencers, from local to transnational content creators, Hurley reveals how residents, non-citizens and migrant workers survive as influencers in the city of ‘likes.’ Providing de-Westernising perspectives of Dubai’s social media influencing industry within the broader context of global platform capitalism, the book offers an important contribution to the field of social media through illustrating visible economies in a city circuited by social media influencing. Zoe Hurley is a Visiting Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre and Assistant Professor in the College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Zayed University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Her research focuses on postdigital cultures, feminist-semiotics and social media in the Arabian Gulf. She has published articles in leading academic journals, including Feminist Media Studies, Visual Communication, New Media + Society, Social Media & Society, Information Communication & Society, Postdigital Science and Education. Her monograph, 'Social Media Influencing in the City of Likes: Dubai and the Postdigital Condition', advances decolonial semiotic theorising. Sarah Hopkyns is an Assistant Professor/Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, UK. She has previously worked in higher education in the United Arab Emirates, Canada, and Japan. Her research interests include world Englishes, language and identity, language policy, translingual practice, linguistic ethnography, linguistic landscapes and English-medium instruction (EMI). Polly Withers is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre, where she leads the project “Neoliberal Visions: Gendering Consumer Culture and its Resistances in the Levant”. Polly’s interdisciplinary work questions and explores how gender, sexuality, race, and class intersect in popular culture and commercial media in the global south.

This event was co-organised by the LSE Middle East Centre and the LSE Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa. This panel explored the crisis in Sudan through the prism of ‘disconnection’, exploring the various disconnects and discordances that have formed between Sudanese popular groups, state institutions and international institutions. Stopping the violence and addressing Sudan’s trauma will ultimately require domestic and international actors to align formal policy-making processes with popular realities on the ground. Speakers explored this notion of disconnection and consider how the sudden displacement of the Sudanese elite from its capital city might re-orient Sudanese politics in future. The panel finally discussed how such disconnections might be repaired. Mai Hassan is Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her work examines topics that span across authoritarian regimes, bureaucracy and public administration, and contentious politics. Kholood Khair is a Sudanese political analyst and the founding director of Confluence Advisory, a "think-and-do" tank based in Khartoum. She is also a radio broadcaster, hosting and co-producing a weekly radio program, Spotlight 249, that is Sudan's first English-language political discussion and debate show aimed at Sudanese youth. Laura Mann is Associate Professor in International Development in the Department of International Development, LSE and a research affiliate of the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa. Laura is a sociologist whose research focuses on the political economy of development, knowledge and technology. Her regional focus is East Africa (Sudan, Kenya and Rwanda).

Iraq’s engagement with fintech is new but rapidly developing, amidst a contemporary economic history that has struggled with foreign intervention and internal corruption, while Iranians have been engaging with a form of fintech - alternative digital currencies - for some time, to evade and work around sanctions and a crippled economy. In this episode we speak to Ali Al-Hilli and Shayan Eskandari, who are working at the intersection of technology and finance, to improve the livelihoods and prosperity in their home countries. Ali Al-Hilli is a tech entrepeneur from Iraq with over 14 years of experience in business development, telecommunications, and fintech. He is currently Marketing and Communications Director at Miswag, the largest and oldest homegrown e-commerce startup in Iraq. Shayan Eskandari is a PhD candidate at Concordia University. Originally from Iran, he has a background in blockchain engineering. Shayan is actively involved in creating and supporting open-source projects related to cryptocurrencies. He has been working on nonprofit educational content in Farsi on the topic of blockchain and cryptocurrencies for over a decade. Find out more about their work here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alihilli?originalSubdomain=jo https://shayan.es/

This event was the launch Eylaf Bader Eddin's new book 'Translating the Language of the Syrian Revolution' published by De Gruyter Press. For activists, researchers, and journalists, the Syrian Revolution was primarily a revolution in language; a break with the linguistic oppression and rigidity of old regimes. This break was accompanied by the emergence of new languages, which made it possible to inform, tell, and translate ongoing events and transformations. This language of the revolution was carried out into the world by competing voices from Syria, by local and foreign researchers, activists, and journalists. While the Arab revolutions have triggered extensive social and political changes, the far-reaching consequences of their cultural and discursive changes have yet to be adequately considered. Bader Eddin's book analyses the various translations of the language of the Syrian Revolution (2011–2012) from Arabic to English. By doing so, exploring the discursive and non-discursive dimensions of the revolution as another act of translation, tracing the language of the banners, slogans, graffiti, songs, and their representation in English. This event will launch Eylaf Bader Eddin's new book Translating the Language of the Syrian Revolution published by De Gruyter Press. For activists, researchers, and journalists, the Syrian Revolution was primarily a revolution in language; a break with the linguistic oppression and rigidity of old regimes. This break was accompanied by the emergence of new languages, which made it possible to inform, tell, and translate ongoing events and transformations. This language of the revolution was carried out into the world by competing voices from Syria, by local and foreign researchers, activists, and journalists. While the Arab revolutions have triggered extensive social and political changes, the far-reaching consequences of their cultural and discursive changes have yet to be adequately considered. Bader Eddin's book analyses the various translations of the language of the Syrian Revolution (2011–2012) from Arabic to English. By doing so, exploring the discursive and non-discursive dimensions of the revolution as another act of translation, tracing the language of the banners, slogans, graffiti, songs, and their representation in English. Meet the speakers Eylaf Bader Eddin is a Research Fellow on the project 'The Prison Narratives of Assad’s Syria: Voices, Texts, Publics' (SYRASP) and a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien. Bader Eddin is also a Researcher in the Department of Arabic Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Harmoon Center for Contemporary Studies, Qatar. His current post-doc research explores Syrian prison musical performances. He has studied Arabic, English and comparative literature in Aix-en-Provence, Beirut, Damascus, Marburg and Paris. Bader Eddin's research has been published in Arabic, English and French, including the Arabic book, ‘When They Cried ‘Forever’: The Language of the Syrian Revolution in 2018’, for which he received the Sadiq Jalal al-Azm Award by Etijahat. Nesrin Alrefaai is a Visiting Fellow and Arabic Content Editor at the LSE Middle East Centre. She holds a Doctorate degree in Drama and Theatre Education from the University of Warwick, UK. Her research interests are language, arts, and politics in the Middle East with a special focus on Syria.