News

The new ARC Discovery Project is titled: Civilisations Mobilisation, Digital Technologies and Social Cohesion, and is led by Professor Ihsan Yilmaz; Dr Priya Chacko and Dr Ana-Maria Bliuc. Project summary: Civilisational populist rulers polarise societies mainly along religious lines. They also interfere with their emigrants, mobilising supporters against other expatriates. This project aims to advance knowledge of authoritarian states’ transnational influence on social cohesion and inter-group conflict. By studying Islamist and Hindutva civilisations mobilisations, their reach into their emigrants via digital technologies, and their impact on Turkish and Indian groups in Australia, the project aims to assist policymakers and community groups by generating conceptual frameworks, benchmarking data, and recommendations for making policies to deal with this phenomenon’s negative effects and for developing intervention strategies.

Congratulations to Prof Benjamin Isakhan for being named Australia’s Leading Researcher in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in the The Australian annual research report.

MESF Ranked as The Top Institution For Middle East And Islamic Studies Research In Australia In 2022 again

Congratulations to Dr Zahid Shahab’s well_ deserved promotion To Senior Research Fellow.

The GPE is a landmark global initiative to map humanitarian research and innovations and investment priorities to improve impact. MESF’s Dr Marian Abouzeid is the Deputy Lead for the mapping component. Find more information here.

MESF non-resident member Professor Michelle Pace will be participating in discussions following the launch of the Routledge Handbook of EU-Middle East Relations. Find more information and register here.

MESF Convenor Shahram Akbarzadeh and Dr Zahid Shahab Ahmed are editors of this new book published by Palgarave Macmillan. Find the book here.

MESF’s non-resident member Professor Michelle Pace has published a chapter in ‘Decolonising (Knowledge on) Euro–Mediterranean Relations: Insights on Shared Histories and Futures‘ (IAI Research Studies). Read the chapter ‘Concluding Reflections: Decolonising Knowledge on Euro–Mediterranean Relations’ here.

MESF’s non-resident member Professor Anoush Ehteshami has an article published by The European Institute of the Mediterranean (IEMed). Read the article here.