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Hosted by MISTRA in partnership with the University of the Witwatersrand
 
The Mapungubwe Institute hereby invites you to MISTRA's 4th Annual Lecture to be held on
21st September 2015 at Wits University.
The historic popular uprisings that rocked the Arab region five years ago and removed four leaderships set in motion a turbulent series of events across the Arab world that have resulted in a wide range of very different outcomes
-- from democratic pluralism in Tunisia to state collapse and the world's largest proxy war in Syria.
The rise of the "Islamic State" group in Syria-Iraq is the latest and most frightening sign of the region's fragility, collapse in places, and political violence everywhere. The new conflicts and civil wars in countries like
Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen also include major regional proxy wars and direct military interventions by regional powers like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, while the festering Arab-Israeli conflict and the refugeehood and occupation of the Palestinian people
continue to act as major forces for radicalisation and destabilisation across the Arab world.
Rami Khouri will speak to the underlying reasons for the very turbulent, often violent, conditions across the Arab world during the past five years, and whether we should expect more rather than less problems ahead. He will
note in particular that the confusing current violence across the entire region can be explained by the collapse in many countries of the three regional orders that had kept the Arab world together for much of the past century, while stable new orders have
yet to take hold. He will analyse how many dysfunctional aspects of the modern Arab world are dying a long-needed death, while new institutions and states forged according to the will of the citizens are still in their early stages of coming into being.
Rami George Khouri is a Beirut-based internationally syndicated political columnist and book author. He was the founding director of the
Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, where he is currently a senior policy fellow directing research on social justice and dignity in the Arab world.
Khouri lectures annually at the American University of Beirut and Northeastern University. He has been a fellow and visiting scholar at Harvard University, Princeton University, The Woodrow
Wilson Center, Mount Holyoke College, Syracuse University, The Fletcher School at Tufts University, the University of Oklahoma and Stanford University.
He was a member of the Brookings Institute's Task Force on US Relations with the Islamic World. He is a Fellow of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (Arab East Jerusalem), and a former member
of the Leadership Council of the Harvard University Divinity School, and the International Advisory Council of the International Committee of the Red Cross. He serves on the Joint Advisory Board of the Northwestern University Journalism School in Doha, Qatar,
and the international advisory board of the Center for Regional and International Studies at the Georgetown University Doha campus.
He was editor-in-chief of the Jordan Times
for seven years and for 18 years was general manager of Al Kutba, Publishers, in Amman, Jordan, where he also served as a consultant to the Jordanian tourism ministry on biblical archaeological sites. He has hosted programmes on archaeology, history and current
public affairs on Jordan Television and Radio Jordan, and often comments on Mid East issues in the international media.
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