The Oxford Middle East podcast, my name was put this focus,
and today I'm joined by the whole Olympic team to discuss notable events that took place in 2021.
Developments we're keeping an eye on in 2022 and a favourite Middle East related books.
After three and a half years of a crisis that threatens the very core of the Gulf region,
PCC leaders have agreed to end divisions and usher in a new era of cooperation.
Foreign countries are scrambling to evacuate their nationals, including diplomatic staff, from Afghanistan.
The US is also having to consider helping Afghans who work with their forces and making themselves potential targets for the Taliban.
Lebanon is ending the year in a state of paralysis will start in its new year,
and while its cabinet hasn't met for two months, the currency continues to lose value.
An investigation into 2020's poor black by the storm.
We begin in the Middle East, where both Israeli forces and Palestinian militants have stepped up their attacks and the worst fighting seen in years.
The UN now warning of the risk of full scale war.
So hello, everyone, and welcome to our New Year's episode,
what's going to happen today is that each of the people present is going to say what that big event of the past year they'll be 2021 was.
They'll say what they're looking out for in 2022, and then they will also say what their favourite book about the Middle East is.
So we'll do one person at a time and we'll start with you chorionic. So please go ahead.
OK, so I kind of imagining what other people would be talking about.
I decided to kind of go local to my interest in terms of what I thought was a very significant event of 2021.
And that was the was a university,
a student protests in Turkey that took place basically over more than the first half of the year from January up until late August,
basically to contextualise it. Demonstrations broke out on 4th of January against the appointment of Milly Bulu by President Erdogan.
Melbourne, who was appointed as the rector, was the university, which is basically like the dean or central president or whatever,
yet another impingement on sort of academic freedoms and freedom of thought into.
As a result, hundreds of students gathered and academics protested as well, and it wasn't contained only to Istanbul.
But of course, there were protests in Ankara and several other places across Turkey.
And one of the the reason I chose it actually is, first of all,
because you have to take it in the context of what sort of Erdogan's legacy in Turkey and what's been happening since really 2016,
where the coup attempt really sort of resulted in void when trying to exert his
stranglehold of power intellectuals and sort of physical power over Turkey as a whole,
and especially Istanbul, which was still sort of a bastion of quote-unquote left-leaning thought.
So that was one part of it. And the other is Bauhaus at the university itself, which is kind of not just a left leaning university,
but also a university that attracts students from across Turkey of all sort of social classes,
etc. So you would have very sort of conservative Muslim students protesting alongside know pro sort of either whatever communist pro LGBTQ,
whatever it is, students and they were all coming together.
It's very rare to have that happen in Turkey, but they were all coming together to protest this, the appointment of this rector.
I would have loved to have said like if we'd done this a little earlier than, say, halfway through the edit we make.
You know what, maybe this is the sign of Erdogan sort of losing his grip over the over the youth of Turkey etc, which many people had wished it was.
I think it's still significant because it shows that the protest is still alive despite his 18 years in power.
Nonetheless, he has appointed a rector of his own, choosing to replace the same one, so he kind of capitulated, but then did the same thing again.
So we'll see what happens of that.
And that's sort of what I'm looking to see in 2022, whether these protests that are happening at blahs, which sort of continue in a certain way.
And I don't think I think it was a bit naive to hope that maybe these protests
signal a change across Turkey and maybe a shift in Erdogan's power on their own,
at least.
And we've seen that with his appointing the next rector on his own, as well as opening to more faculty departments as part of a midnight order.
But I do think that and it should be mentioned that the current tanking of the lira,
which is ongoing and is currently dropped by about 40 percent over the year against the dollar and 30 percent in November alone,
it will be interesting to see whether who sort of first came into power with the very strong economic policy,
whether this will sort of add to sort of the ongoing sort of intellectual quote-unquote intellectual protest against him,
whether this will actually be backed by a sort of very serious economic considerations of the people, particularly after a pandemic.
So I think that it would be interesting to see whether any of this actually shifts
Erdogan's power and in which case how that would affect the larger region.
And your book the book I chose is Schauf Shah's by a Polish journalist whose name I'm going to butcher,
but I'm going to try anyway, which is Richard Kapuscinski. It was written in 1980, published in 1982, and it's a really short book.
It's by no means sort of like if you want a complete history of the Iranian Revolution, this is not it.
But nonetheless,
it's a really good account of basically the decline of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and sort of the rise of Khomeini from a journalistic perspective.
So he was in Iran at the time he was holed up in a hotel.
He's by no means an Iran expert and that sense, he doesn't know Farsi or anything, but that's what he is an expert on sort of report.
He was a war correspondent and a foreign correspondent who he has reported.
You know, I think he reported about like 27 coups and revolutions.
Over the course of his career,
so when he's no expert on Iran and I'm sure many people can sort of read into that in some way as hysteria types the Middle East,
but in other ways, he sort of is very sympathetic to the Iranian people, which is not something that happened at the time.
At the time, it was very much. Why would they sort of go against democracy and choose Khamenei, etc., etc.?
A lot of the writing that came out of that time was sort of baffled at this quote unquote backward shift.
But what he does instead is show the kind of suffering that is endured by the Iranian people under the Shah and under his the SAVAK,
which is the secret police. And he's a very good writer as well.
And he went through and it needed to rein in history and who wants?
An easy read is less than 200 pages, but it's beautifully written.
So this is what I chose for today's podcast. Perfect.
And guy, you're next. So my big event was the fall of Kabul and the withdrawal of the American forces from Afghanistan.
And that's pretty massive.
And the notion of a 20 year war since 9-11 and with the defeat of the Americans and kind of that humiliation, which is which is pretty important.
I think it's really humiliated the Americans in the region and in the world as a whole and marks
the sort of slow drawback and withdrawal of American power in the region and the wider world.
There's also going to be a massive economic crisis. There is an economic crisis in Afghanistan.
You've got a lot of commentators saying there's going to be potentially a humanitarian catastrophe since a lot of people
in Afghanistan were villains and sort of rent your system with foreign aid and doing the funds going to feeding people,
basically. Now those funds have been frozen and even frozen nine point five million dollars, I think, in the central bank.
The Taliban are really going to struggle to look after the people in general.
On top of that, it's a war torn country. So it's going to be a bit of a mess. Besides that, you've also got the Qataris and you support one faction.
And Pakistan is just another. And you've got other regional players like China, Iran,
who are also going to try and have influence in some somewhere or another one looking out for in 2022 is kind of similar to that.
Related to that, so I'm interested in China's how China is going to step into the shoes.
I suppose you could say that the US left. They won't be the same kind of vibe to China's its own special way of doing things with a
lot more money than thinking a lot less going for human rights and apostrophes or whatever.
It will be interesting to see how they express their interests and pursue their interests in places like China Central Central Asia,
which are both incredibly important for the Belt and Road Initiative. And as well, how they relate to the Gulf countries, not be fun.
Yeah, especially in the context we can't forget of rising antagonism or rhetoric of rising antagonism between East and West.
I think everyone will notice that they can last couple of years,
China from being a sort of neutral place that typically think about in an adversarial sense.
Now, a lot of people in Western countries are talking about China as the next enemy and a Cold War 2.0.
So it be interesting in this Cold War to see which side the Middle Eastern
countries or countries of that region will choose if they have to choose sides.
If the Americans were Persian, if the Chinese were Christian,
I'm excited to see my book that I've chosen is Osman or the CPI that's got so completely unrelated.
I have scores of British Turkish journalists.
She goes to Turkey before she gets bombed in search of traces of the Ottoman Empire, usually in the form of minorities.
So she talks the Afro Turks, who are descendants of slaves in Turkey and have their own sort of culture and their own understanding of self.
She talks to Bosniaks, who don't speak Turkish but have a strong connexion to well.
They have an adoration for all of the world in the Ottoman Empire, and a lot of it is about narco nationalism swept away all of this.
Heterogeneity, but traces of it still remain, which is pretty exciting and true, then it is my turn.
My big event of the votes relates is well, the first was the Israeli elections because after over a decade in power,
Netanyahu finally left under a cloud of controversy.
And I was very happy to see that because I thought he was an odious man.
The unfortunate situation is that my most of hopes of it being an improvement or the new government
being an improvement over the open were dashed when in May the Israelis started bombing Gaza,
which is the second half of my big event of the year. There's only, you know, my big events of the year because it was sad and horrific what happened.
But what I did realise and so of you might have realised that as well was how active it seemed.
People in the West were about it like it seemed to be much more prevalent on social media than previous Israeli incursions in the West Bank into Gaza,
and friends of mine who had never really cared about the conflict before God got in touch with me.
And in order to ask me if I could send them good articles or give them some information about why it was happening,
whether they could donate to and the fact that and their twins, Mohammed had concluded that no,
no, I think they both also were named by Time Magazine as amongst the 100 most influential people in the world,
which shows how big the Palestine question has become the last year.
So for me, those were very encouraging developments, despite the very sad situation in which they happened.
So on the other hand, like Gaza and Israel, Jordan and Israel as a whole is very sad.
The fact that it is getting so much more attention is is very positive and also shows that the actually,
I'll just call it propaganda of Israel at times hasn't been quite as effective in amongst younger people as it has amongst older people.
The thing I'm looking out for next year is two of them.
One of is the same as last year, which is the death of the Saudi king.
I'm not looking forward necessarily, but I'm very curious what's going to happen if he dies just as I was one year ago?
Because if he dies, he is part of the old guard of Middle Eastern leaders.
And will that change? For example, Saudi Arabia's stance towards Israel also will.
That's caused. These changes are currently happening in Saudi Arabia to go even faster because Mohammed bin Salman now feels that as king,
he has even more absolute power than than he already does.
So that's for me, you're going to be interested in. The second thing is the normalisation with Syria.
In October, the Jordanian king had a phone call with Assad. Assad has also been visited.
The UAE and Syria will host the energy conference in 2024.
So it does seem that these countries, unfortunately are repairing their relationships with with Assad,
which you know again, he is also an even more odious man than Netanyahu was.
So I'm a bit disappointed, I guess, that he is being allowed back into the fold.
But on the other hand, I also totally understand that you can't keep him out forever,
even though I feel that would be the more reasonable approach regarding books.
My books are the same as last year, so I'm not going to mention them.
But what I'm instead of going to do is mention the people who were on this episode last year predicted just to see how everything's gone.
The first thing is Felix. He mentioned the Libyan Civil War, which I guess has had a relatively positive development.
There's been a rapprochement between Turkey and the southern and opposite sides of the war there anymore.
Not as much. The Libyans also announced elections in which the son of Gadhafi is going to run, if I'm not mistaken.
So hopefully it doesn't win because that will be a bit of a sad state of affairs.
Michael mentioned that he was looking out for Biden's approach to Iran and the
JCPOA and the re-entry of America or Iran into the JCPOA has so far not happened.
And especially because of the current Iranian government, you know, there has been very little progress.
On the other hand, many Israeli intelligence and military officials have said that Netanyahu's Iran policy,
which was very much in line with Trump's Iran policy, was a narrow minded and counterproductive policy.
So at least it seems to be a bit of reflection on that side. Freddy mentioned the normalisation of Arab states with Israel.
There hasn't been any progress there after a record in Morocco, Bahrain both normalised relations, but that has been fairly inconsequential.
I mentioned the Saudi king he is still alive has looked at more Arab involvement on Morocco side in the Western Sahara,
but I haven't been able to find any clear information on developments like the
U.N. peacekeeping mission was renewed and Algeria has closed its space tomorrow.
But that's it. But we have done an episode on sort of recommend people who haven't done so to listen to it.
Rose looked at how Iran was doing, and the answer to that is incredibly poorly.
The inflation is above 40 percent. There's been water protests, there's a massive number of COVID deaths, and they have had their.
An immersive quotation marks earlier this year, Max also looks at elections, and he was hopeful,
but in the end they ended up going the wrong way and the hardliners won and Helena hope that Lebanon situation would improve.
And that has absolutely no happened as blackouts, as a lack of medicine, the sectarian violence.
So overall, the outlook from last year has not been very good for this year.
With that, my thought is done. So go ahead, Isabella. All right.
Well, actually, as I was listening to Guy, got me thinking a little bit more about my big event for 2021.
And I actually began to think even more about, say, gender relations, which is actually a big interest of mine.
So what I had previously planned to talk about is actually going to shift a little bit, so I'll be answering differently.
But like Guy, my big event from 2021 being from the US and living in the US this past year before coming to Oxford was,
of course, the fall of Kabul and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan being in the US when this happened.
Obviously, this was huge news and was highly controversial in the US, just as it was everywhere around the world, news wise.
So I know there were lots of people in the US that were for the withdrawal to say quote,
end the war, bring the soldiers back home, all of those, all of that kind of rhetoric.
And then there were plenty of other people in the US that were highly concerned about
how hasty this withdrawal would be and what situation it would leave Afghanistan in.
And as we have seen, the fallout has been pretty, pretty serious with the fall of Kabul and the Taliban's effective takeover.
I think what I'm sort of looking out for in 2022 as a result is to see what will occur with women's rights in Afghanistan and gender relations.
I know that the Taliban has answered several questions.
I think even NPR. One of NPR's journalists has interviewed a member of the Taliban and received
answers sort of based on women's rights such as all women will have rights.
They will be quote, respected all of these things.
But there has also been other sources saying that that's not really what's occurring as of right now.
There's been talk of even forced marriages occurring in Afghanistan between Taliban soldiers and women.
So it will be interesting to see how women's rights are negotiated by Taliban leadership.
And that's what I'm sort of looking out for in 2022 is what gender relations and the situation for women will look like in Afghanistan.
And your book, the book would be for reminding me that would probably be.
I took a course when I was an undergrad called Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East, and we read several ethnography in the course.
The course actually sealed my interest in Middle Eastern studies. One book I remember, I think it was the first one we wrote.
Actually, that really made an impact on me and sort of made me very interested,
especially in gender relations in the Middle East was by an anthropologist,
Palestinian-American anthropologist named Leila Abu Lugo, and this ethnography that, she wrote, was called veiled sentiments.
And it was written during the time she was with a Bedouin community in the western desert of Egypt.
So she studied gender relations and oral lyric poetry of young men and women.
So I I really enjoyed the book, and it just made me more interested in Middle Eastern studies as a discipline and specifically in gender relations.
Oliver, are you ready? So my big event from 2021, which is the very big event,
sadly links to one of the sort of looking forwards from last year, which is the descent of Lebanon into further crisis.
Obviously, after the very explosion of August 2020, there was hope with money coming in from abroad and that, you know,
Lebanon might, with the coming of 2021, might be looking up as was hoped by someone on the podcast last year.
But as you mentioned, just already, sadly, that hasn't been the case.
The already crushing inflation, which was which has been going on since 2019, has has gotten worse and worse with, I believe,
the Lebanese pound on the black market in January,
beating at about nine thousand Lebanese pounds to the dollar where it today stands a 28 and a half thousand to the dollar.
So obviously that's led to a lot of the country plunging. I think about more than 80 percent of the country is now living in poverty.
Obviously, the financial crisis has led to fuel shortages, which have been very widely publicised with, I believe in October,
the two main power stations in the country shutting down, leaving the country completely without electricity, which we've seen during the pandemic.
Is even more disastrous because, you know,
this has led to hospitals not having having electricity and having to count on generators which are run by diesel,
which then hasn't been available either. So for me, that's been a really big thing.
I visited Lebanon myself in January of this year and I was able to see the the effects of inflation and also got caught up in a huge COVID lockdown,
which seems very unfair on the people because all shops were closed and left people with no way of getting essential things which they needed.
There has been a tiny positive point, which is that in September, Lebanon finally got a new government which which resigned.
The previous government resigned after the explosion, of course, in 2020.
I am not too optimistic about it because the government is led by Rashid Mikati, who's been prime minister a few times before.
He's well known Lebanese billionaire. Well, I think of the well looks of Lebanon and feels a completely new approach is needed.
Mikati hails from exactly the same political class of people who led Lebanon into the crisis, which is now.
So that was a really big thing for me, which I'm certainly not too optimistic about.
And then the thing I'm looking out for in 2022 is Lebanon's neighbour, which is the further development of the conflict in Syria.
Obviously, the Syrian conflict was really, really publicised in 2015 2011, with ISIS rising to power.
But now, for quite a long time, people seem to sort of forgotten about it.
Well, actually, I think we're further away from a solution there than than we have in Syria ever has been in the north of the country.
There's this military stalemate, which is hugely complex, obviously being the battle ground for a proxy war and then the political stalemate where,
for example, in October, the Syrian Constitutional Committee in Geneva failed to draught a constitution.
And then of course, there were the elections in 2021 as well,
the first since 2014 where Assad won much five percent of the vote and now has been sworn in as president until 2028.
So I'm really looking out to see any developments, but again, I'm not very hopeful because it seems that not much is going to be changing.
And all the while, the people of Syria have had horrendous poverty and hunger have reached an all time high,
prices of essential products have gone up by hundreds of presents.
But I always look forward to 2022 or perhaps beyond with with with some hope, even though that is sort of tucked away behind lesser expectation.
And then my favourite book at the moment, obviously, it's very hard to pick links in with this.
It is the book called Destroying a Nation The Civil War in Syria, which has only come out in 2017.
Being Dutch, I have to bring liberal Dutch element into this is written by Nicholas van Dung, who is a Dutch scholar but also very,
very experienced Dutch diplomat who was ambassador to string of countries including Iraq, Egypt and Turkey, many others.
And in 2015, he was appointed the Dutch special envoy to Syria. So he has an unparalleled combination of experience and knowledge of Syria.
And the book is obviously a comprehensive account of the Syrian conflict.
But it's also very clear. And the great thing of it is that Nicholas Winton dedicates a huge portion of it,
as is necessary to understanding the conflict to the rise of the Baath Party and basically huge summary of Baathist history,
which enables because so many things are linked. The conflict doesn't stand alone.
In 2011, so many things have been running in Syria since the 70s and 80s, which have just been waiting to burst, as they did.
And I think I really enjoyed about the book as well is that obviously Nicholas went on being a diplomat.
He also dedicates quite a bit at the end to looking forward to potential ways that can be done about to to find a solution or two potential scenarios,
which again, then sadly look very promising for at least the next year, but hopefully, hopefully in the future.
So I can definitely recommend it to anyone who has an interest in Syria because it is a fantastic,
fantastically written book as well by someone who has really, really great knowledge of the region.
Go ahead, Adam. So for me, point twenty one has been obviously,
it's been extremely eventful in terms of political events in the Middle East that will be called the Middle East.
I would say Southwest Asia. I would say that my most important thing was in Palestine.
What happened in May? The events in May in Palestine has been.
They have been. Something I wouldn't say, maybe maybe it's it's a stretch to say that they were unprecedented,
but they were definitely something that we haven't seen in a while.
And the reason wasn't because of the violence. It wasn't because of the scale of the events.
It was because Palestinians from all over the world, but most importantly,
inside of Israel Palestine, have been able to find unity in their struggle against Zionism.
And I've been speaking to people in Haifa, I've been speaking to people in Nazareth,
I've been speaking to people in the West Bank and in Gaza, and they were all saying the same thing.
We, for the first time since forever feel united, and it was quite incredible to see how there is.
It was, it was a clear example of colonial violence being exercised on an indigenous population.
If you look at it from that lens and you could see how the result of that war was a defeat for Israel.
And the definition of that is because, I mean,
I would say that because I think that the definition of colonial war is that if the coloniser doesn't win,
it means that the colonised or the indigenous succeeds in the struggle because they prevail, which is what happened in Gaza.
So, yeah, that was quite quite an extra extraordinary event for me.
And I thought it was very inspiring and also stressful for everyone in the Diaspora.
But yeah, no, that was absolutely incredible.
So that's why I would say what anyone looking ahead into point twenty two, I'm very curious what's going to happen with the US one?
I think it's coming to a head now. You know, it's interesting how different interests are coming into clash there,
especially with it's interesting to see the contrast between the leadership of
Egypt before 2011 and then during the short Mubarak period than now with Sisi.
How basically they have no idea what they're doing in a way.
And they know that they can't intervene militarily, but they are willing to say that they are, but they can't do it because of us influence and so on.
But I would hope that they could find an Africa centred or the region centred solution to that crisis,
because I think there's potential to solve it and to fight for every country to benefit from the Nile.
But it will require a lot of support, probably on the diplomatic side, and I'm not sure that it's even possible,
especially since Sudan right now is in turmoil after Duke's resignation and lots of protests in the streets.
But hopefully it will. Just for clarification, you said. But do you mean the Ethiopian renaissance?
Oh yeah. George Miller Yes. Yes, yes, of course.
I mean, the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Yeah, yeah, that's one dam is just there.
That was quite a big as well. But yeah, that was that was news in the fifties, wasn't it?
No. Yeah. And then my favourite book relating to Southwest Asia Africa is definitely brighter on the floor by Marie Maryvale Barbosa,
which translates to I saw Home Alone by Mudgal Barghouti, who was a Palestinian poet and a writer.
And I love that book because it really when I first read it in English and then I read it in Arabic later on.
And it was interesting for me because it really spoke to me and my experience of.
Going to Palestine as someone who was distanced from that place for a long time,
even though it was obviously different from him because he's going back to Palestine after 30 years of not being there,
10 years due to the occupation and his exile in Egypt and elsewhere.
But the feeling was very similar, and it's written in a really beautiful,
poetic language, which actually you can appreciate even with the translation.
So, yeah, I would definitely recommend everyone reading it and it and it gives this very human,
very personal view of the situation of what does it mean to be a Palestinian?
What does it mean to be Palestinian in exile? What does it mean? A Palestinian Palestine?
And it shows the seldom shown reality of the slope of this.
Wall between the Diaspora and. The people who are still in Palestine and how difficult it is to really know what does it mean to go back to Palestine?
He says this one thing in the book, which stuck with me, which is we will know that we've returned to Palestine only when we will get bored of it,
when we will get bored of the scenery, when we are exhausted by the heat and we stop romanticising this land,
which is a land, you know, that's what it is. But because we've lost it.
This is why we cherish it so much, or this is why we cling so inch to it, even though it's completely ordinary, basically.
So when we would get bored of it, when we are, when we were fed up with it, this is when we returned.
So massive go ahead. So my big event from 2021 actually happened right at the beginning of 2021, which was the resolution of the Qatar crisis.
You know, I think this is really indicative of Saudi Arabia and the UAE is I did sort of like turn a page and seek to manage or resolve and resolve,
you know, regional conflicts through dialogue and diplomacy rather than through conflict.
I think we're going to see this play out over the next year and the normalisation of relations with Syria, which, you know,
is consistently going on as it becomes more and more clear that it looks like Bashar al-Assad is going to win the Syrian Civil War.
And, you know, the continued normalisation of relations between Israel and the various Arab states in the region, especially in the Gulf sweet.
The upcoming year at the upcoming thing you're looking out for?
Or would that be the Syrian thing? No. So the upcoming thing, we're going to go across the region.
So I specialise in Jordan and historically in Jordan and Iraq.
So neither of these events strangely have anything to do with Iraq or Jordan.
But what I'm looking forward to next year is the upcoming elections in Libya.
So, you know, this cease fire was brokered in 2020 by the UN, and then elections were supposed to happen at the end of December.
They did have to be postponed until the end of January 2022,
so it'll be exciting to see how the first comprehensive elections since the Arab Spring and
the peace agreement between the government of National Accord and General Haftar's forces.
And you know, it's going to be really interesting to see what the elections in the united Libya look like,
because whoever does end up becoming the leader of Libya faces a series of challenges with just reconciliation from the Civil War.
Normalisation of relations with Arab neighbours, as well as the European Union, the United Nations, the United States and, you know,
the ongoing conflict in the Eastern Mediterranean over petrochemical hydrocarbon resources there,
which I think Libya is increasingly going to become a player between that conflict with Turkey, Israel and Egypt.
Do you have any faith in the elections? Because I mean, it's the one big thing that's sort of restored faith for me was when they said when
they accord dismissed Gadhafi's sons candidacy from being president of Libya,
which was, I think, a plus going forward.
I think we, you know, Libya, what's best for it is to have a sort of total removal from the past.
So nobody left over from Gadhafi's government. Nobody left over from, you know, in sort of a reconciliation between those, you know,
some of the ministers from Haftar's and government and some of them from the government national court.
If that's possible, it's not. I think the U.N. government of National Accord will be successful and and running the nation if they win the elections.
And your book so my favourite book on the Middle East has to be.
Generally, it probably is Eugene or against the Arabs.
But a more recent book that, yeah, a more recent book that I like is actually How The West or Democracy from the Arabs by Elizabeth Thompson.
It talks a lot about the Syrian Arab Congress in 1920 and how, you know,
Europeans at the Paris peace conference after World War One, you know, didn't fulfil the promises that they made to Prince Feisal.
And it deals with a lot of these ideas of greatest division of Greater Syria after World War One,
which is something I'm really interested in and thinking about delving into for a master's thesis.
And a lot of the research that Elizabeth Thompson did for this book occurred at the Middle East Centre at Oxford, which is very cool.
And of course, you know, as all good books as a, you know, yardstick of approval for good books on the region,
it does have the Eugene Rogan stamp of approval on the inside. He has this little review.
So yeah, I think it's very good to move about halfway through it now, but I'm looking forward to finishing it this year.
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Oxford Mills political.
Almanac is a student, an initiative at the Middle East and University of Oxford.
The opinions expressed in the podcast are not in any way represent the official opinions of the University of the Middle East and.