Is there a way out of the Middle East crisis?

The multi-front war that erupted on 7th October 2023 has led to tens of thousands of civilian deaths, catastrophic levels of food insecurity, mass population displacement and a growing movement towards international legal accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The war spread from Israel and Palestine to Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen, each involving complex (geo)political alignments. Left unchecked, the war risks expanding further into regional countries and drawing extra-regional powers, some already deeply involved, into even greater levels of confrontation – potentially disrupting Persian Gulf oil and gas supplies with serious consequences for the world’s economy.

This war did not occur in a vacuum. It should be situated in the longer history of the conflict and a regional context marked by authoritarian fragmentations, intractable violence and instability. There is not a single inflection point of crisis in the Middle East but a series of overlapping conflicts with cascading effects, a multitude of different actors and forms of organised violence. 

The collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, along with the rise of new power players such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and the advent of a new administration in the United States, has further complicated this regional geopolitical landscape.

This panel will discuss the crisis in the Middle East from a regional and global perspective with an emphasis on scenarios and strategies for peace and justice. 

Meet the speakers and chair 

Jasmine Gani (@JasmineKGani) is Assistant Professor in International Relations Theory at LSE. Prior to joining LSE, she was a senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of St Andrews where she taught postcolonialism and decoloniality and the Arab-Israeli conflict. She has won multiple awards and nominations for her teaching at both St Andrews and LSE. She was also the Co-Director for the Centre for Syrian Studies at St Andrews which was awarded a ‘world-class’ ranking in the last Research Excellence Framework for its research and knowledge exchange. She specialises in anti-colonial theory and history, and the politics of empire, race and knowledge production. Her research has been published in International Studies Quarterly, Security Dialogue, International Affairs, Postcolonial Studies, and Millennium, among others. 

Yezid Sayigh (@SayighYezid) is a senior fellow at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, where he works on the comparative political and economic roles of Arab armed forces, the impact of war on states and societies, and the politics of authoritarian resurgence. Previously, Sayigh held teaching and research positions at King’s College London, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Oxford, and headed the Middle East program of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Sayigh was also an adviser, negotiator, and policy planner in the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks with Israel 1991-2002 and advised on Palestinian public institutional reform until 2006.

Buğra Süsler (@BugraSusler) is a lecturer in International Organisations and International Conflict and Cooperation in the UCL Department of Political Science, and Visiting Fellow at LSE IDEAS. He holds a PhD in International Relations and an MSc in Politics and Government in the EU from LSE, as well as a BSc in Politics from University of Bristol. He is the author of Turkey, the EU, and the Middle East: Foreign Policy Cooperation and the Arab Uprisings, which examines Turkish foreign policy decision-making processes regarding cooperation with the EU during the Arab uprisings. His research areas include foreign policy analysis, emerging powers, and international conflict and cooperation.

Rim Turkmani (@Rim_Turkmani) is the Syria Research Director at the Conflict and Civicness Research Group and within the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform (PeaceRep). She is also a Senior Policy Fellow at LSE IDEAS, a member of LSE Middle East Centre Academic Committee and a member of the Women’s Advisory Board to the UN Special Envoy to Syria. She has led several research projects, serving as the Principal Investigator on ‘Legitimacy and Citizenship in the Arab World’ funded by the Carnegie Corporation.  She was also a Co-PI for the research project ‘The Responsible Deal: Where and How to Best Protect and Integrate Syrian Refugees?' Dr Turkmani’s research is centred around legitimate governance in the Middle East, local conflict and peace drivers and the role of civil society in conflict zones. She has produced wide -reaching research on the lack of democracy and persistent violent conflicts in the Arab World. 

Marika Theros is a policy fellow at the Conflict & Civicness Research Group, LSE IDEAS and Director of the Civic Engagement Project. She was also PI and co-director of PeaceRep’s Afghanistan Research Network. Her current research and advocacy apply an ecosystem approach to political mobilization, global-local dynamics, and process design for social change movements and organizations. At LSE, she led a comparative research stream investigating local peace agreements across six key conflict affected sites, and worked with the Syria team to examine the design of inclusive mechanisms in Syrian political talks with a focus on questions of legitimacy and sustainability.