Amid the shifting strategic landscape of the Middle East and the changing relationships shaping the region, Fiker Institute hosted Dr Lina Khatib, scholar of Middle Eastern geopolitics and security, Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative, and Chatham House Associate Fellow, to discuss the implications of these pivots for regional security, diplomacy, […]

INTRODUCTION Although Fahrelnissa Zeid spent her life living and working in Türkiye, Europe, and Jordan, she did not see herself as belonging to any particular nation or faith.1 Instead, she understood her identity as an artist in universal terms, saying that she belonged “neither to a country, nor to a religion. I was born on this earth. […]

INTRODUCTION The imaginary construction of the West’s need to ‘save’ women outside its borders, backed by military power and political legitimization across decades, is what Edward Said invited us to reconsider in his seminal work Orientalism. Instead of focusing on how people in the Middle East are represented or misrepresented, he calls for us to consider the power-knowledge nexus […]

INTRODUCTION The downfall of the Assad regime on December 8, 2024, closed a painful chapter in Syria’s history, ending more than half a century of Assad family rule which shaped political, social, and economic spheres for all Syrians. From Ba’athification to Assadification,1 the Syrian state revolved around the Assad persona and the country became what was dubbed Souriyya […]

Libyan artist Asmahan Elfergani’s work is largely absent from the formal record of art history, but she is remembered in oral histories and private collections. This Essay seeks to establish a preliminary biography of the artist and her work as it endures through homes, conversations, and the quiet persistence of remembrance.

Fiker Institute’s Working Group on Gulf Foreign Policy held its second meeting and discussed the implications of the ceasefire announcements and the ongoing Strait of Hormuz crisis.