We invite you to join the Center for Middle East Studies (CMES) at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs for an evening of discussion, featuring Faysal Itani, senior fellow at the New Lines Institute. The discussion will examine Lebanon’s ongoing political and economic crisis alongside broader post-war regional dynamics, including rising U.S.-Iran tensions and their implications for Lebanon and the wider Middle East.

We invite you to join the Center for Middle East Studies (CMES) at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs for a book signing and evening of discussion with Professor Vali Nasr, Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins. Nasr will discuss his new book, "Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History".

Read more about this newly-published book here.

Edited transcripts of a panel discussion and interview with Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), on the issue of Holocaust denial in the Arab-Islamic world.

Randall Kuhn, former Associate Professor at the Korbel School and Director of its Global Health Affairs Program, addresses the important issue of why the Arab uprisings of 2011-2012 erupted when they did by focusing on the “retreat from marriage” in the Gulf states and how it complicates the simplistic notions advanced to explain the uprisings.

Todd Green, Associate Professor of Religion at Luther College, critiques the common trope that Islam as a religion is in need of a reformation primarily through the writings of the controversial author and polemicist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

In April 2018, Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi delivered the keynote speech at the annual conference of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) in Washington, DC, where he received the Muslim Democrat of the Year Award. Following his murder in the fall of 2018, CMES published an edited transcript of his speech in honor of his courage and willingness to speak truth to power.

Elizabeth Tsurkov, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, offers a close analysis of internal Israeli debates as it relates to the war in Syria and documents the specifics of Israeli intervention in Syria from 2011 to 2019.

CMES Director Nader Hashemi takes a dissenting view of the Abraham Accords, the agreement in the summer of 2020 between Israel and two Arab states (Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates).

On May 30, 2019, thirteen scholars met at the University of Denver’s Anderson Academic Commons to hold a frank scholarly conversation aimed at confronting the raw horror of the Christchurch mosque shootings.