Implications of Trumps second term for the Middle East

The second Trump presidency promises to have profound implications for the Middle East. The region is facing a series of cascading wars and crises with multiple geopolitical fragmentations and overlapping sites of war and violent conflict. 

This briefing session will focus on three questions:

- What are the outlines of Trump's Middle East policy? How will it address the Israel-Palestine question, the interconnected Israel-Iran conflict, post-Assad Syria and US-Arab relations?

- What impact will a Trump presidency have on Iranian influence in the region and potential approaches to resolve conflicts in Syria and Yemen?

- What scenarios are possible, where does this leave rights-based strategies for peace and human security? What impact will Trump have on civil society movements in the region, and prospects for political reform and social justice?

Meet the speakers and chair 

Mohanad Hage Ali is the deputy director for research at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut where his work focuses on the shifting geopolitics and Islamist groups after the Arab Uprisings.Hage Ali teaches politics at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and has lectured at the Lebanese American University in Beirut. In his work, Hage Ali focuses on Levant politics, and has published a book titled Nationalism, Transnationalism and Political Islam: Hizbullah’s Institutional Identity in 2017, and co-edited A Restless Revival: Political Islam After the 2011 Uprisings. Prior to Carnegie, Hage Ali worked as a reporter at al-Hayat newspaper in London, and as an editor in chief of NOW Arabic in Beirut, where his work focused on political Islam and Iraq.

Zaki Mehchy is a researcher for the Syria team at the Conflict and Civicness Research Group. He is also a Senior Consulting Fellow at Chatham House, and Co-founder of the Syrian Center for Policy Research. His work focuses on development policies. He has conducted research on socio-economic impact of the crisis in Syria, poverty and multi-dimensional deprivation, labor force, local governance, and community empowerment. In 2002, Zaki obtained a Diploma in International Economic Relations from Damascus University. He has MSc in International Economics from the University of Essex.

Marika Theros is a policy fellow at the Conflict and Civicness Research Group at LSE IDEAS and the PI and co-director of PeaceRep’s Afghanistan Research Network. Her research focuses on political mobilization, global-local dynamics of violence and change,  peacebuilding and multi-stakeholder dialogues, the politics of knowledge production, and the securitization of climate change. She is also the co-founder of the Civic Ecosystems Initiative, a platform to explore the phenomenon of ‘civic ecosystems’ and social innovation and the director of the Civic Engagement Project (CEP) which works at the intersection of action-oriented research, policy and civic engagement in difficult environments. 

Luke Cooper (@lukecooper100) is Associate Professorial Research Fellow in International Relations and the Director of PeaceRep's Ukraine programme, based at the Conflict and Civicness Research Group in LSE IDEAS, the LSE's in-house foreign policy think tank. He has written extensively on nationalism, authoritarianism and the theory of uneven and combined development, and is the author of Authoritarian Contagion; the Global Threat to Democracy.

This event is part of a series of webinars on Trump 2.0 and the age of polycrisis organised by the LSE Conflict and Civicness Research Groups based at LSE IDEAS, the in-house foreign policy think tank of LSE. These sessions from our research community provide a series of 60 minute briefings on the impacts of Trump’s second term for some of the issues and contexts that we research.

This event is organised as part of our work for the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, funded by UK International Development from the UK government. However, the views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the UK government’s official policies.