Potential Opportunities and Challenges for the Middle East and Kurdistan
Thu, 11 Feb 2021, 5 to 6:30 pm Greenwich Mean Time (UTC±0)
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Potential Opportunities and Challenges for the Middle East and Kurdistan Under Biden’s US
As the Trump administration and the highly irregular policymaking process that characterised it came to an end, hopes for a new chapter in the relations between the United States and Kurdish political actors in the Middle East have risen.
The support the Kurds received from international powers was instrumental for protecting their hard-fought gains, but this support was often limited and shaped by the internationals’ immediate concerns. Though the Kurds proved to be loyal allies, on too many occasions, they were left alone to deal with hostile neighbouring states. This panel discussion will scrutinise the potential course in the US-Kurdish relations under the Biden presidency and seek to assess whether the current engagement pattern will continue, or a more coherent Kurdish policy will develop in the next four years. Speakers – Yerevan Saeed, Dr. Dilan Okcuoglu and Mohammed A Salih, discussion will be moderated by Bilal Wahab.
Join the discussion on Thursday, 11 February at 5pm
The event is open to all and to join you must register via this link.
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*The event is 1.5 hours long. The last 30 minutes will be a Q&A session.
Due to limited participation quota in Zoom event, we will be broadcasting our meeting live on Facebook as well.
If you can’t participate in the event on Zoom, you can watch it on our Facebook page.
Yerevan Saeed is a Research Associate at Middle East Research Institute (MERI). He is a Ph.D. candidate at the Carter School for Peace, George Mason University. He previously served as White House Correspondent for Kurdish Rudaw TV and has worked for news agencies including the New York Times, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the BBC, and The Guardian as a journalist and translator.
Dr. Dilan Okcuoglu is a postdoctoral fellow in Global Kurdish Studies at the American University, School of International Service in Washington, DC. Prior to that, she was a visiting scholar at the Cornell University, M. Einaudi Center for International Studies.
Also, affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Democracy and Diversity at the Université du Québec à Montréal in 2018-2019. She received her PhD and MA in Political Studies from Queen’s University in Canada. She has another MA degree from Europe (Central European University); finished her undergrad in economics (Bogazici University). In addition to academic life, she has keen interest in diplomacy and policymaking. Dr. Okcuoglu has an interdisciplinary background in politics, economics and philosophy. Her teaching and research interests primarily lie in the politics of MENA, conflict and peace studies, comparative territorial and border politics, democratization, global justice, ethnic politics and nationalism as well as state- minority relations in conflict zones. Okcuoglu has already published book chapters and op-eds. She is currently working on her article manuscripts and a book proposal in DC
Mohammed A. Salih is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.
Salih’s research broadly focuses on the intersections of (geo)politics, media and culture, as well as the study of identity, ideology, and power, with the Middle East region constituting his main area of empirical focus.
Prior to his PhD journey, Salih worked as a, mostly freelance, journalist for around a decade covering the Islamic State conflict, the aftermath of the Iraq War, and Kurdish affairs. He still occasionally writes for and provides commentary to media outlets. His bylines have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Inter Press Service (IPS), Al Jazeera English, Al-Monitor, Foreign Policy, Newsweek Middle East, Christian Science Monitor, France 24, The Daily Beast, The Nation, Middle East Eye, World Politics Review, The Kurdish Globe, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs and The Independent, as well as Kurdish news publications Rudaw, Awene and Xebat. His video stories have aired on Deutsche Welle (DW), FRANCE 24, Channel News Asia, and Rudaw. He has been interviewed extensively on international news outlets such as Sky News, DW TV, France 24, CNN, Fox News, i24 News, BBC Radio, VOA News, Rudaw and NPR commenting on Kurdish and Iraqi affairs.
He has also published analytical pieces with Washington-based think tanks Middle East Institute and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on local politics of Kurdistan.
Bilal Wahab is the Nathan and Esther K. Wagner fellow at The Washington Institute, where he focuses on governance in the Iraqi Kurdish region and in Iraq as a whole. He has taught at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani, where he established the Center for Development and Natural Resources, a research program on oil and development. He earned his Ph.D. from George Mason University; his M.A. from American University, where he was among the first Iraqis awarded a Fulbright scholarship; and his B.A. from Salahaddin University in Erbil. Along with numerous scholarly articles, he has written extensively in the Arabic and Kurdish media.
