Lecture

Monday, 7 November, 6.30pm

At: Dar Isaaf Nashashibi
30 Mount of Olives Road
Sheikh Jarrah
East Jerusalem
(Above Gallery Café)

Tel: 052-582 8101
www.kenyon-institute.org
www.facebook/kenyoninstitute

This is a joint event between the Kenyon Institute,
the Educational Bookshop and Dar al-Tifel al-Arabi
This talk will examine the birth and reasons for the growth of the Islamic State or in Arabic ad-Dawlah al-Islāmīyah fīl-ʻIraq wa ash-Shām, or Daʿesh. Formed in Iraq in 2006 at the height of the civil war that engulfed the country after the US-led invasion and regime change of 2003, the organisation reached the peak of its power after the US withdrew from Iraq, seizing the country’s second largest city, Mosul,
in June 2014. The military campaign against the Islamic State has succeeded in dramatically reducing the territory it
holds in both Iraq and Syria. However,
the Islamic State is best understood as a violent symptom of a set of much deeper, primarily political, problems that have plagued Iraq since 2003. If these problems are not sorted out then a new equally radical and violent organisation may well take the Islamic State’s place.
Toby Dodge is a Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is also the Director of the LSE’s Middle East Centre. His books include Inventing Iraq: the Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (2003) and Iraq; From War to a New Authoritarianism (2012). He has published papers in The Review of International Studies, International
Affairs, International Peacekeeping, Monde Arabe, Maghreb-Machrek and Third World Quarterly, and has published articles in The Guardian, The Observer,
The Washington Post and the Times
Literary Supplement.

Professor Dodge’s visit is the product of
a joint project between the LSE Middle
East Centre, Birzeit University, and the Kenyon Institute.