The Kurdish Gender Studies Network

The Kurdish Gender Studies Network (KGSN) has just released its first report, which documents six years of feminist organising, community building, and intellectual collaboration across borders. The network began as a small volunteer-run initiative and, within a short period, grew into a transnational community. It managed this without institutional support or funding, relying instead on collective political concern, care, commitment and the determination of people working under difficult conditions: colleagues from Kurdish territories in exile, early‑career scholars navigating precarity, researchers recognised as scholars at risk, and others who cannot return home because of political repression or the risks attached to working on Kurdish issues. Alongside them are non‑Kurdish allies, diaspora Kurds, Kurds of mixed heritage, and Kurdish queer scholars whose presence has expanded and reshaped the field. The report is more than a record of activities; it is a testament to an emerging Kurdish de(s)colonial feminist politics, practices and perspectives that sustain this dispersed feminist community.

Kurdish Gender Studies as an Emerging Field

Over the past two decades, Kurdish Gender Studies has grown into an increasingly rich interdisciplinary field. Scholars, artists and activists have explored themes such as culture and politics, movements and resistance, incarceration, memory, displacement, migration, arts and literature, sexuality, and more. Recent work on Kurdish cosmovisions – the ways Kurdish communities imagine, interpret and live their relationship with the world – has added an important philosophical and cultural dimension, highlighting how ideas about existence, care, nature, community and survival shape everyday life and gendered experiences. Together, these contributions have expanded the scope of Kurdish Studies and challenged the epistemic frameworks through which Kurdistan, Kurdish histories and Kurdish futures have long been studied.

More crucially, these developments have unfolded within a stateless and subaltern intellectual tradition shaped by political fragmentation, recurrent censorship and criminalisation, and the marginalisation of Kurdish knowledges within dominant regimes of knowledge production. These conditions have shaped, and continue to shape, who can produce knowledge and where, as well as what can be studied and how knowledge is circulated, archived and sustained. Studies on Kurdish women no longer position them merely as objects of inquiry; through their scholarly, creative, organisational and everyday practices, they have become producers of knowledge whose work challenges frameworks shaped by the heteronormative male gaze and dominant national states. Their contributions recentre Kurdish women’s and queer experiences, voices and modes of theorising as vital sources of feminist and decolonial thought.

Sexual Harassment Interventions

KGSN emerged in 2020 from feminist organising among scholars who shared deep concern about gendered harm in academic spaces. Like many academic and activist communities, ours has not been immune to urgent conversations about sexual harassment. These discussions, which were difficult, yet necessary and long overdue, led to the creation of an open forum committed to ‘generating, promoting, and sustaining an anti-sexist, anti-racist, and anti-homophobic culture and scholarship in Kurdish Studies,’ and to building ‘solidarity and collegiality on the basis of these values’ (Open Forum Poster 2020 in KGSN report 2026:10).

The harms caused by sexual harassment are not abstract. We have seen how it leads to silencing and isolation, withdrawal from shared academic spaces, and the quiet redirection of research trajectories. Beyond building and strengthening our own networks, responding to these harms required more than statements of principle; it demanded practices of care, protection and collective responsibility. This is why, at the LSE 2024 Kurdish Studies Conference, KGSN members circulated a statement inviting panel moderators and presenters to begin their sessions by pledging to stand against sexual harassment and misogyny. The following year, at the LSE 2025 conference, a code of conduct on sexual harassment was included in the delegate pack. Both interventions were meant to show our determination to keep addressing the issue, while also reminding participants – and encouraging organisers of similar gatherings – to adopt zero-tolerance policies and commit to professional, inclusive and harm-free scholarly spaces.

KGSN Activities and Language Politics

Since its formation, the KGSN has organised more than fifty activities across online, in‑person, and hybrid formats: lecture series, panel discussions, author and editor conversations, workshops, reading groups, roundtables, conference panels, teach‑ins, and informal mentoring. Through these events, we have stayed in conversation with scholars, students, writers, artists, translators, and activists working across Kurdistan, Europe, the MENA region, and the Americas.

Although English remains the network’s main language of communication, our roundtable discussions at the LSE Kurdish Studies Conference and the linguistic diversity of our membership, including Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, German, and Spanish speakers, have made clear how important multilingual spaces are. Without funding for professional interpretation, we have relied on volunteer and ad-hoc interpreters, and on the generosity of participants willing to listen across languages. At our most recent meet and greet event, even limited translation capacities revealed a collective openness grounded in Kurdish feminist practice: a commitment to linguistic justice as central to collective knowledge production. Forthcoming volunteer translation of the KGSN report into the two main dialects of Kurdish (Kurmanji and Sorani), as well as Arabic and Turkish, is an important step in this direction. We hope making the report available in multiple languages (any other volunteer translators are welcome) will help transcend the limits of nationalist linguistic policies for a wider space of academic exchange and help to expand the network.

Constructing Intellectual Infrastructures

KGSN has grown into far more than an organiser of academic events; it has created spaces where feminist and queer scholarship can surface, gain visibility and develop across national, political, linguistic and institutional borders. Through its platforms and activities, scholars and students from anthropology, sociology, education, politics, the arts and humanities have come into conversation with artists, translators, independent researchers, community educators and activists. These encounters have created an ongoing dialogue that is not bound by narrow disciplinary boundaries or political orientation. Universities matter, but they are not KGSN’s only intellectual home. The network’s platforms, shaped by the meeting points between academic work and activism, have helped nurture environments where disagreement, reflection and diverse ways of knowing can sustain collective thinking. The report shows how KGSN has contributed to building this infrastructure, creating spaces where Kurdish Gender Studies can grow while remaining attentive to the political and ethical conditions that shape how knowledge is produced, shared and collectively sustained.

The post Kurdish Gender Studies Network: Towards a Decolonial Pedagogy first appeared on Middle East Centre.

The Kafala System by Saad Kassis-Mohamed examines migrant labour governance across the Gulf and Lebanon, the vulnerability of domestic workers, and trafficking and forced criminality in Myanmar. In an interview with James U. Cole, Saad discusses the distance between legal reform and practical protection, the conditions that prevent workers from leaving, and what institutional accountability actually requires.

James U. Cole: The Kafala System examines migrant labour through law, institutional reform and the experiences of workers themselves. What do you see as the central question running through the book?

Saad Kassis-Mohamed: The central question is one sentence. What happens when a worker wants to leave?

Labour systems are usually assessed through legislation, regulation and announced reform. Those matter. They do not tell us what a worker encounters when attempting to exercise a right. A person may hold the formal right to change employment, submit a complaint or leave an abusive workplace and still be unable to use it. Immigration status, economic dependency, recruitment debt, withheld documentation, the absence of alternative accommodation and the fear of retaliation each stand in the way.

That gap between a right on paper and a right that can be exercised is the subject of the book. Reform is judged by whether it shifts the balance of power inside the employment relationship, and by whether a worker can use the protections available without exposing themselves to further harm. The test of the kafala system is whether a worker can leave. There is no more reliable measure.

James U. Cole: The term ‘kafala’ is frequently used as though it describes a single, uniform system across the Middle East. Does that oversimplify the issue?

Saad Kassis-Mohamed: Considerably. Kafala has never operated identically in every country, and the legal position has changed substantially over time. Different governments have introduced different reforms, different categories of worker fall under different rules, and enforcement varies widely.

Countries must therefore be distinguished from one another rather than treated as a single legal system. Some jurisdictions have removed or substantially reduced particular forms of employer control. Others retain stronger forms of dependency. Within one country, a construction worker, a professional employee and a domestic worker occupy entirely different positions.

The term retains its value because it directs attention to the link between employment and immigration status. The problem becomes serious at the point where a worker’s lawful presence, employment, housing and ability to move between jobs all rest on a single private employer.

A serious assessment acknowledges reform where it has occurred and continues to examine the protections that remain incomplete. Recognising progress and identifying remaining vulnerability are not competing positions.

James U. Cole: Why does the book place so much emphasis on the difference between formal reform and implementation?

Saad Kassis-Mohamed: Because legal reform is the beginning of institutional change, not its conclusion. The kafala system does not end when the law changes.

Governments can amend legislation quickly. The harder task is ensuring that administrative systems, courts, labour ministries, recruitment agencies, employers and enforcement authorities act consistently with the new framework.

For a migrant worker, implementation arrives as a set of practical questions. Is the complaints procedure comprehensible and reachable? Can the worker remain in the country lawfully while a dispute is heard? Can unpaid wages be recovered in fact? Is interpretation available? Can a person obtain temporary accommodation after leaving an employer? Will an allegation of absconding create a second legal problem? How long does the process take?

These questions appear administrative. They determine whether a legal right has any practical value.

Reform cannot be measured through legislative announcement. It is measured through outcome: whether workers successfully change employment, whether complaints are resolved, whether wages are recovered, whether abusive practice carries consequence, and whether the workers most at risk reach the institutions built to protect them.

James U. Cole: Domestic workers occupy a particularly prominent place in this debate. Why are they so important to understanding the limitations of existing labour protections?

Saad Kassis-Mohamed: Domestic work presents the hardest enforcement problem in labour law, because the workplace is a private household.

A domestic worker may live with the employer and depend on that employer for accommodation, transport, documentation, communication and contact with the outside world. There are no colleagues present. Conventional workplace inspection is far harder. Abusive conduct can remain invisible for long periods.

That produces an enforcement problem of a particular kind. A right that is reachable for someone employed by a large company can be unreachable for someone who lives inside the workplace and has minimal contact with public institutions.

Domestic workers are therefore the test of whether reform reaches the people most dependent on enforcement. If a protection works chiefly for workers already able to navigate institutions independently, the protection gap has not closed.

This is also why domestic-work regulation cannot be treated as a question of employment contracts alone. Shelter, complaint mechanisms, legal assistance, documentation and a safe alternative to remaining with an abusive employer belong to the same protection system.

James U. Cole: Lebanon is also examined extensively in the book. How does the Lebanese experience contribute to the wider discussion?

Saad Kassis-Mohamed: Lebanon demonstrates why labour migration has to be read within its institutional environment.

Its political economy, legal framework and recent economic circumstances are distinct from those of the Gulf states, and treating Lebanon as another version of the same model would be misleading. The question of dependency nonetheless remains, particularly in domestic work.

Where the employment relationship is tied to a worker’s legal status and ability to remain in the country, leaving an employer carries consequences that resigning from an ordinary job does not. That imbalance is most serious where workers have limited access to labour-law protection or to effective remedy.

Lebanon also shows that institutional capacity is not a secondary concern. Severe economic and administrative pressure weakens enforcement even where the need for reform is widely recognised. Legislation cannot protect workers if the institutions responsible for implementing it lack capacity, accessibility or public confidence. Reform must alter the legal rules and the institutional environment in which workers attempt to use them. One without the other achieves very little.

James U. Cole: Your own advocacy concerning migrant and domestic workers is discussed in the book. What do you consider the proper role of advocacy in this field?

Saad Kassis-Mohamed: Advocacy begins with evidence and institutional responsibility.

Human rights advocacy is often conducted through broad declaration. Public attention has real value. But advocacy becomes useful at the point where it identifies a specific problem, establishes which institution carries responsibility for it and makes a concrete request for reform or intervention.

If workers cannot reach a complaints mechanism, the question is not whether that situation is unjust. The questions are why the mechanism is unreachable, which authority administers it, what procedural obstacle stands in the way and what change would open access.

That level of specificity is what makes accountability possible. A concrete demand allows advocates, journalists, researchers and workers themselves to return later and establish whether anything changed.

James U. Cole: Your advocacy has extended beyond migrant labour. An earlier area of engagement concerned reform of Liberia’s Aliens and Nationality Law, amended in 2022. What did that experience establish for you about the relationship between advocacy, law and institutional change?

Saad Kassis-Mohamed: Liberia showed that human rights advocacy can engage with the architecture of law itself rather than remaining at the level of general principle.

Nationality is not a technical question. It determines legal status, access to equal treatment and the relationship between a person and the state. My advocacy identified the provisions that required reform and argued for a framework consistent with equality and with contemporary understandings of nationality rights.

The amendments were the product of a wider political and institutional process involving Liberian lawmakers, public authorities, diaspora communities, civil-society organisations and other advocates. Legislative reform of that kind is never the work of one person. Advocacy contributes to the environment in which a longstanding legal problem becomes visible, harder to defend and capable of generating institutional action. That is the honest description of its role.

The experience shaped the way I have approached human rights work since. There is a difference between identifying an injustice and identifying the legal mechanism that reproduces it. Naming the injustice is not the harder task.

The same discipline carries into migrant labour. Stating that workers are vulnerable or that a system is unequal achieves nothing on its own. The dependency has to be located in specific provisions, and the responsibility in specific institutions, before anything can be asked of anyone.

Liberia established the method. Durable reform follows when a rights problem is translated into a concrete legal and institutional question.

James U. Cole: The book eventually moves beyond the Gulf and Lebanon to examine trafficking and forced criminality in Myanmar. These appear to be very different phenomena. What is the analytical connection?

Saad Kassis-Mohamed: They are different phenomena, and that distinction has to hold.

Kafala describes systems of migrant employment and sponsorship. Trafficking into scam compounds in Myanmar involves deception, physical confinement, threats, violence and forced participation in criminal activity. The legal frameworks, the political environments and the degree of coercion are entirely different.

The comparison operates at a different level. What prevents a person from leaving a coercive relationship?

In a migrant-employment setting, the restrictions are immigration dependency, recruitment debt, withheld documents, fear of losing lawful status and the absence of a realistic alternative employer. In a trafficking setting, the barriers extend to armed confinement, physical violence, surveillance, threats against relatives and transfer between operators.

These situations are not equivalent and the book does not present them as equivalent. Examined through the practical ability to leave, they occupy a single continuum of dependency and coercion.

Freedom within an employment relationship cannot be defined by the absence of physical restraint. A person can be technically able to walk through a door while facing consequences severe enough that the freedom is not real.

A person can be technically able to walk through a door while facing consequences severe enough that the freedom is not real.

James U. Cole: Myanmar’s scam-compound economy has also drawn attention to the concept of forced criminality. Why is that concept important?

Saad Kassis-Mohamed: Because the visible conduct of a person does not establish whether that person acted voluntarily.

Someone found participating in online fraud appears at first to be an offender. If that individual was recruited through deception, transported across a border, confined, threatened or subjected to violence and compelled to carry out fraudulent activity, the legal and moral assessment is entirely different. Victim identification is therefore decisive.

Authorities have to examine the circumstances of recruitment, travel, working conditions, control over documentation, freedom of movement, threats, debt and the person’s realistic capacity to refuse.

The principle of non-punishment applies directly here. Trafficking compels victims to participate in unlawful conduct as an element of their exploitation. Where authorities examine the offence and disregard the coercion behind it, they treat the consequence of trafficking as evidence of voluntary criminality.

An effective response requires criminal enforcement against those operating coercive enterprises and victim-identification procedures capable of separating coercion from genuine participation. Neither works alone.

James U. Cole: One of the broader themes of the book is institutional accountability. What should researchers look for when governments announce reforms or anti-trafficking measures?

Saad Kassis-Mohamed: Whether outcomes correspond to announcements. Governments deserve recognition when they introduce meaningful reform. Analysis cannot stop at the announcement.

Researchers should examine what follows it. Are workers using the new mobility provisions? Are complaints processed within reasonable periods? Are unpaid wages recovered? Are recruitment violations investigated? Can domestic workers reach assistance? Are abusive employers and intermediaries sanctioned where the evidence supports it? Are trafficking victims identified and protected? Can independent organisations and journalists scrutinise implementation? Those indicators describe institutional effectiveness. Announcements do not.

Transparency matters for the same reason. Reliable data on complaints, resolutions, labour mobility, enforcement action and victim assistance separates structural reform from measures that exist at the level of policy.

Independent scrutiny is not hostility towards reform. Independent assessment is frequently what allows a successful reform to be identified, a weakness to be corrected and public confidence to develop. Independent scrutiny is not hostility towards reform.

James U. Cole: Critics of international labour-rights advocacy sometimes argue that external scrutiny can overlook local context or present reforming states as though nothing has changed. How should advocates avoid that problem?

Saad Kassis-Mohamed: By being precise.

Human-rights analysis loses credibility when it ignores genuine improvement. Where a government removes a restriction, strengthens a protection or creates a mechanism that workers are successfully using, that should be stated plainly. Recognising reform does not require abandoning scrutiny of its implementation. The two are separate exercises.

The constructive approach distinguishes between what has changed, what remains unresolved and what the evidence shows about outcomes. That is more useful than treating every reform as either a complete success or an empty gesture.

Local context is essential. Labour markets differ, legal systems differ and migration systems develop within particular economic and political circumstances. Recommendations have to be grounded in the institutional reality of each country. Context explains how rights can be implemented effectively. It does not justify preventable abuse.

The underlying standards of dignity, freedom from forced labour, access to remedy and protection against exploitation hold regardless of the institutional route taken towards them.

James U. Cole: What, in your view, would constitute meaningful reform of migrant labour governance?

Saad Kassis-Mohamed: It begins with reducing the forms of dependency that allow one private party to exercise disproportionate control over another person’s employment and legal security.

Workers need a realistic ability to change employment, leave abusive conditions and seek protection without facing consequences that effectively compel them to remain.

Recruitment carries equal weight. Excessive recruitment fees create vulnerability before a worker reaches the destination country. Wage protection, accessible dispute resolution, regulation of recruitment agencies, effective labour inspection and meaningful consequences for abuse form part of the same structure.

Domestic workers require specific attention, because the private household creates enforcement problems that ordinary labour inspection cannot address.

Reform must also include practical infrastructure. Rights require institutions: complaint mechanisms that people can actually use, shelter where necessary, legal assistance, interpretation, temporary documentation, efficient courts and enforcement that functions. The test does not change. Does the system give the worker a credible alternative to remaining in an abusive relationship?

James U. Cole: If there were one principle you would want readers to take from The Kafala System, what would it be?

Saad Kassis-Mohamed: The practical right to leave.

That principle does not explain every form of labour exploitation, and it does not displace the need to address wages, recruitment fees, occupational safety, discrimination, trafficking or access to justice. It remains the clearest way to examine power inside an employment relationship.

Where a worker cannot realistically leave an employer, the remaining rights become difficult to enforce. The ability to leave alters the relationship itself. An employer operates within a different institutional environment when a worker can resign, change jobs, approach an authority and continue to live and work lawfully without requiring that employer’s permission.

Labour systems should therefore be evaluated not only by the protections written into legislation, but by what happens to the least powerful worker who attempts to use them. A right becomes meaningful when the person it was written to protect can actually use it.

Note: This interview gives the views of the participants and not the position of the LSE Middle East Centre blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

The post Interview with Saad Kassis-Mohamed – ‘The Kafala System Does Not End When the Law Changes’ first appeared on Middle East Centre.

Environmental forecasting would be much easier if the environment behaved normally.

Imagine an ordinary morning in Kuwait: pollution is stable, weather is changing gradually, and a model confidently predicts PM2.5 will stay near 35 µg/m3. Then the sky changes colour. A dust storm arrives, concentrations spike, and the relationships the model relied on stop holding – precisely when we would most like it to be clever.

Artificial intelligence can turn Kuwait’s environmental monitoring data into more than a record of the past, using patterns in pollution, weather and time to anticipate what happens next. But our work suggests the interesting question is not simply whether AI can predict pollution – it is when it can, what information it needs, and whether a correct prediction tells us enough to act.

From Watching the Environment to Anticipating it

This project builds on earlier LSE Middle East Centre research using machine learning to help Kuwait move from data to action. Pollution has memory, and time of day, season, temperature, humidity and wind all matter – but how we formulate the problem matters as much as the algorithm. Environmental variables represent physical processes, not interchangeable spreadsheet columns, and compressing them automatically into a smaller mathematical representation can discard distinctions that matter. Variables we selected using domain knowledge have sometimes outperformed automatic reduction.

And then there is the sandstorm.

Being Right Most of the Time May Not be Good Enough

Consider two hypothetical models, with illustrative figures. On ordinary days, true PM2.5 is 35 then 42 µg/m3; Model A predicts 36 and 40, Model B predicts 43 and 49. Model A is the clear winner – until pollution suddenly rises to 150 µg/m3, and Model A predicts 80 while Model B predicts 140.

Which model is better? There is no sensible answer until we know what we need it for. If most days resemble the first two, Model A’s smaller average error makes it better for typical conditions. But if our purpose is warning people before exceptional episodes, Model A’s biggest mistake happens exactly when accuracy matters most – not a ‘better algorithm’ problem, but a model specification one.

Rather than expecting one model to do everything well, we could combine models built for different jobs: one for the regular rhythms of pollution, an anomaly detector to flag when conditions stop resembling those rhythms, and others designed for extremes – a team of specialists – one for ordinary days, another for when the sky turns orange.

What if the Model Cannot See What it Needs?

Monitoring networks rarely provide every measurement, everywhere, at every hour, and missing information is not all missing the same way – a sensor that stops reporting, a variable never recorded at all, and an unrecorded event like new construction are three different problems needing different responses. Some gaps can be estimated from nearby stations, but no method can recover information never collected. The claim that AI improves with more data is half the story: what was measured, where and when, and what was never measured, matter just as much as the volume of observations.

The Algorithm was Right. Now What?

Suppose our model forecasts PM2.5 spiking to 150 µg/m3 tomorrow. For someone deciding whether to exercise outdoors, that warning alone is useful. But for an environmental authority, the number does not say whether a dust storm is approaching, whether local pollution is accumulating, or what can be done about it.

This is where explainability matters: knowing a forecast relied heavily on wind speed and direction tells us more than 150 alone. But an explanation of the model is not yet an explanation of the environment – the next question is what that relationship represents physically, which requires domain knowledge and, where appropriate, causal analysis, not just asking how the model made its prediction. Prediction, model explanation and mechanism are three separate questions; explainable AI can only answer the first two, though it can flag which relationships deserve closer investigation.

Six Hours or Six Minutes?

A model that predicts a spike six minutes ahead and one that predicts it six hours ahead may be judged against the same outcome, but their practical value differs: six minutes might suffice for someone deciding whether to run, while schools, hospitals and public authorities need far more lead time. Yet forecasting further ahead generally means predicting through greater uncertainty, so there is no single answer to ‘Can AI predict Kuwait’s air quality?’ – only how far ahead, under which conditions, with what uncertainty, and whether that is enough time to act.

From Environmental Data to Environmental Intelligence

Our work began with a simple ambition: use Kuwait’s environmental data not only to understand the past but to anticipate what comes next. We remain optimistic – but experimenting with the data has made that ambition more interesting, not less. Environmental variables are information about physical processes, not merely algorithm inputs; good average performance can conceal failures during unusual conditions; missing information can mean different things; and predicting, explaining, identifying a cause and deciding what to do are related but distinct problems.

That points to a richer idea of environmental intelligence: models specialised for different conditions, monitoring that reliably collects what they need, attention to rare but consequential events, and forecasts designed around the decisions they support.

Perhaps the specification for Kuwait’s environmental crystal ball was wrong all along. We should not ask it to predict everything, everywhere, perfectly – we should ask harder questions: when is the forecast reliable, what information is missing, why is the model warning us, how far ahead can it see, and is that far enough to act? Because the real test of an environmental forecasting system is not how impressive it looks on an ordinary Tuesday.

This project forms part of the Kuwait Programme, funded by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Science (KFAS).

The post What Kuwait’s Air Quality can Teach Us about AI Forecasting first appeared on Middle East Centre.

Tourism is one of the more effective ways a country can broaden its economy. A developed sector brings in foreign spending, attracts investment, and generates demand that spreads into transport, agriculture, retail and construction. Recent research also suggests that diversifying a country’s tourism markets and activities can be a genuine driver of economic growth. Kuwait would like a larger share of this activity. A stronger tourism sector would help loosen its dependence on oil, support local businesses and stimulate the wider economy. For now, however, the sector remains modest, well short of what the country’s resources and location might allow.

When this shortfall is discussed, the conversation tends to settle on a single missing ingredient: a larger airport, a revived national carrier, a new museum or a flagship resort. Each of these matters, yet none of them, on its own, explains why the sector has struggled or how it might grow. The reason is that visitors do not buy any of these things in isolation. They buy a journey assembled from many parts: a flight, ground transport, a hotel room, meals, attractions and the services that fill the spaces between them. That journey is delivered by dozens of separate firms and public bodies, few of which coordinate their decisions with one another.

This is precisely why it is useful to think of tourism as a supply chain.

Zhang, Song and Huang (2009) describe a tourism supply chain as a network of organisations that together produce and deliver a tourism product, extending from the suppliers of flights and accommodation to the distribution and marketing of the finished experience at a destination, and encompassing both private enterprises and public institutions. In plainer terms, it takes in everyone whose work a visitor encounters, from the farm that supplies a restaurant to the ministry that issues a visa. Figure 1 sets out the general structure of the tourism supply chain.

Figure 1: A typical tourism supply chain within a destination (from Zhang, Song and Huang, 2009).

The chain can be read from right to left. Tourists sit at one end, and the intermediaries closest to them, the tour operators and travel agents, assemble and sell the trip. Behind these intermediaries stand the direct, or ‘Tier 1’, suppliers that a visitor deals with in person: accommodation, transport, excursions, shopping and dining. Further upstream lie the ‘Tier 2’ suppliers that remain largely invisible to tourists, among them food and drink producers, craft makers and the providers of equipment and utilities. Beneath the entire structure sits local government (or a national government in the case of Kuwait), which sets the rules, provides the infrastructure and carries responsibility for the sector’s long-term health. Two things move through the chain in opposite directions: services travel towards the tourist, while information travels back towards the suppliers.

Seen in this way, the relevant questions change. Rather than asking whether Kuwait has enough hotels or a competitive airline, we begin to ask whether the individual links actually connect. Does investment in one part of the chain reach the others, or does it stop where it lands? Does information flow between the actors, or does it break down along the way? And are local suppliers genuinely integrated, so that visitor spending circulates within the economy instead of leaking abroad?

A recent post on this blog, Kuwait’s Aviation Paradox, advances a similar argument for air travel. The country is investing more than a billion dinars in an ambitious new airport terminal, yet, as its authors observe, an airline “does not function in isolation.” Its success depends on airports, regulation, tourism strategy and governance working in concert. What holds for aviation holds for the sector as a whole. A spectacular terminal that opens onto an uncoordinated destination is, in the end, an expensive gateway to very little.

Understood through this lens, Kuwait’s difficulty looks less like an absence of components than a weakness in the connections between them. That is, in some respects, a more encouraging diagnosis, since connections can usually be built faster and more cheaply than world-class assets. The essential ingredients are already present: available capital, a strategic position between three continents, a distinctive culture and an established domestic leisure tradition of sea chalets, desert camps and weekend farms. Some links in the chain are genuinely strong, while others are considerably weaker: coordination between public agencies, the thin network of operators able to market Kuwait abroad, and the long, quiet summer season.

A supply chain perspective allows this stock to be taken honestly. It offers a way to identify what already works, to locate the weakest links, and to recognise where the remedy lies in better coordination rather than in further spending. It also discourages the habit of measuring success by a single prestige project, directing attention instead to whether the separate pieces combine into an experience worth travelling for. For a country that has long approached tourism one asset at a time, the more useful question is whether the chain as a whole can be made to hold.

The post Rethinking Tourism in Kuwait: A Supply Chain Perspective first appeared on Middle East Centre.

The Anfal operation carried out by the Baʿthist Army against the Kurds in 1988 played a central role in shaping Kurdish identity in Iraq and forms one of the foundational narratives of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Although many written sources discuss Anfal, the most authentic remain the oral testimonies of survivors. These narrators speak not in abstract terms but through lived experience, drawing on culturally embedded references like nature, tradition, religion, and collective memory. This blog introduces an ongoing study focusing on the Jabbari area in the Garmian region near Kirkuk. By analysing collected oral testimonies through fieldwork, the study aims to reconstruct a coherent narrative without altering the narrators’ words or structure. The findings reveal that these oral accounts implicitly follow a pattern aligning with historical research methods.

The Anfal Campaign in Jabbari

The Anfal campaign was carried out in eight phases between February and September 1988. According to Kurdish sources, approximately 182,000 people were killed and more than 5,000 villages destroyed. Iraqi forces launched coordinated air and ground attacks which included the use of chemical weapons. The third phase of the campaign, led by Barq Haji Hanati, focused on the Garmian region and parts of Kirkuk between 7–20 April 1988. During this phase, there were approximately 159,433 casualties, of whom an estimated 43,841 were killed. Many civilians were taken to detention camps in Topzawa, Dibz and Tikrit, while others were executed in the deserts of southern Iraq. Survivors later returned to Kurdistan after Saddam Hussein declared a formal amnesty following the end of the Iran-Iraq War. Jabbari, which is part of Garmian, suffered heavy losses during the Anfal campaign. Out of a population of 2,481, 284 deaths were recorded, approximately a tenth of the population.

Codes of Anfal

Images are in part connected to the natural environment of Kurdistan. For those who have been dispossessed, nature constitutes the primary source of knowledge, particularly in the form of the animals, birds and insects observed closely by villagers. This natural landscape in a Kurdish village can serve as a source for narrating the experience. For instance, when recounting the arrival of the soldiers, one of the survivors employed the metaphor of the locust to illustrate the destructive nature of such pests.

The Day of Judgment is a concept of paramount importance in Islam, and Anfal narratives employ it as a metaphor to describe their experience. In Islam, the Day of Judgment is defined as a time when each individual is preoccupied with their own affairs, yet it is also marked by widespread screaming and distress. A mother is not aware of her baby, and the child is not aware of the father. To achieve a closer connection between the narrator and the listener, according to one survivor of Anfal, ‘the noise of children, women, dogs, and sheep, mixed with smoke, made us feel like we were in Judgment Day.’ ‘We felt like we were witnessing Judgment Day on Earth.’

To define Anfal, one must move from the natural world and the realm of religion to the world of cultural expression. Within this cultural context, Anfal seeks to identify the symbols and signs that convey this experience, attempting to find answers through the cultural meaning attributed to them. The Kurdish expression ‘not even a needle can reach the ground’ signifies a state of saturation beyond which no further element can be absorbed.

While religion, culture and nature provided metaphors for the survivors, the Anfal attack simultaneously created situations which defied such resources and left the survivors clueless. This is illustrated by frustrations expressed by one survivor: ‘I don’t know you left us that night. I don’t know why that night felt so endless. No, what have we done? Do these guards have guns? Didn’t know where we were going. The buses kept coming and taking people away. We didn’t know what they were doing to these people. What are they going to do with them? Are they going to kill him, or not? I don’t know why they [the soldiers] did this. We didn’t know what they were doing to us in Arabistan.’

Anfal and Kurdishness

The people who were killed in the Anfal attacks identified as Kurds. When they became targets of the genocide, they saw that all the Anfal victims were Kurdish speakers and that being Kurdish was the reason they were attacked. Upon arrest and detention at Topzawa prison camp, one survivor explained: ‘You thought there was nobody left, but there was a crowd.’ There, they learned that the Kurds were in danger. Another said: ‘As we looked around, we could see only Kurdish men. It felt as if there was not a single man left in all of Kurdistan – everyone was here.’ One asked, ‘Well, are the Kurds really helpless? Kurds think they can’t do anything to help themselves. But when they see this massacre for the first time and realise that no one can save them, they ask the same question about why they can’t help themselves. Another idea is that it was God’s anger towards the Kurdish people. In Islam, when God is angry with a group of people, He punishes them severely.’

Conclusion

The study argues that narrators of such atrocities as Anfal, even when they make great efforts, cannot fully transform their oral narratives into pure reality. The Jabbari oral narratives of Anfal yield a significant finding: its oral history is narrated within a specific local social context, which gives these accounts a strong sense of realism rather than fiction. Under these circumstances, the role of the historian is to explain what happened and why. In their endeavours to write about genocides such as the Anfal Campaign, historians cannot afford to ignore oral speech and narratives. They ought to relay the story as it is told by survivors, before deciphering the narrative codes embedded within the story. This approach allows for both a theoretical and empirical engagement with oral testimonies. Through this practice, we identify both the narrative methods used by the narrator and the codes of speech present in the Jabbari oral history narratives of the Anfal Genocide.

The post The Oral Narrative of Anfal in Kurdistan first appeared on Middle East Centre.

A few years ago, I came across an inspiring community initiative called Kuwait Forest. Like many people, my first reaction was simple: could Kuwait really become greener? For a moment, the answer seemed obvious. Plant more trees. Reduce temperatures. Capture carbon. Improve air quality. Reduce dust. Create shade. 

But environmental sustainability is rarely that simple. The real question is not whether Kuwait should plant more trees, but whether it is planting the right trees, in the right places, under an effective environmental framework and with sustainable long-term financing. As I explored these questions through my research, I found myself looking beyond tree planting to a policy instrument rarely associated with environmental governance: Islamic waqf.

A Country under Thermal Stress

The effects of extreme heat are already reshaping everyday life in Kuwait. In 2026, the Civil Service Commission reduced government working hours during the summer to ease pressure on the national electricity grid, while electricity conservation measures were introduced across public facilities, including mosques , alongside temporary rotating power cuts in residential areas during periods of peak demand. These responses reflect a broader environmental reality rather than isolated administrative decisions.

Kuwait has recorded temperatures approaching 54°C, with days exceeding 50°C becoming increasingly common. Combined with worsening dust storms, water scarcity and rapidly growing electricity demand for cooling, these trends illustrate the country’s growing climate vulnerability.

Expanding urban greenery is therefore no longer simply an aesthetic ambition; it has become an important element of climate adaptation. Yet planting more trees alone will not solve the problem. Long-term environmental resilience also requires effective governance and sustainable financing.

Why Planting Trees is Not Enough

Tree planting can undoubtedly improve urban environments. However, poorly planned greening may also create unintended environmental consequences. Selecting species that require intensive irrigation places additional pressure on scarce water resources, while introducing vegetation unsuited to Kuwait’s desert ecology can damage fragile ecosystems.

My interviews with environmental volunteers, practitioners and public officials revealed a consistent message: the main challenge is not public enthusiasm but governance. Environmental awareness, clear regulation and institutional coordination are just as important as funding. Without them, even successful community initiatives often lose momentum.

Reframing Green Waqf as an Environmental Governance Framework

This is where my research introduces the concept of Green Waqf. Historically, waqf has financed mosques, schools, water infrastructure and public gardens across the Muslim world. Its defining characteristic is permanence: assets are preserved while their revenues continue supporting public benefit over the long term. This makes waqf particularly suited to environmental governance, where projects require stable financing beyond political and donor cycles.

Rather than a charitable mechanism for planting trees, Green Waqf should be understood as a governance framework for long-term environmental stewardship. I argue that it rests on three connected pillars:

• Community  – promoting environmental awareness, volunteering and public participation.

• Environmental Authority  –  providing scientific guidance, ecological assessment and regulatory oversight.

• Awqaf Institutions  –  providing stable, long-term financing aligned with national environmental priorities.

Together, these three pillars make environmental initiatives both sustainable and scalable.

From Concept to Implementation

To move Green Waqf from concept to practice, Kuwait should:

• establish a national Green Waqf framework that clearly regulates environmental endowments;
• strengthen coordination between the Environment Public Authority, the Kuwait Awqaf Public Foundation and community initiatives;
• require ecological assessment before funding greening projects; and
• invest in long-term environmental awareness and education supported through sustainable waqf financing.

Beyond the Trees

Kuwait does not lack environmental ambition. Nor does it lack committed communities or institutions capable of supporting long-term change. What remains missing is a framework that brings these elements together.

Greening Kuwait will never be measured simply by the number of trees planted. It will be measured by whether those trees form part of a broader system that protects ecosystems, strengthens communities and supports future generations. Green Waqf offers an opportunity not merely to finance that future, but to help organise it.

The post Can Kuwait Really Become Greener? Why Planting Trees Is Only Part of the Answer first appeared on Middle East Centre.

Whether the ceasefire agreement holds or it goes back to ‘moderate shooting’, the US-Iran war has produced a sticky perception of fragility in the Gulf’s security environment. A peace deal will, at best, deliver a state of stable instability, where the structural drivers of conflict remain unaddressed and every party leaves with the standing expectation that war could resume anytime, soon. That perception will reshape the oil market for decades.

Fifty years ago, a war in the Middle East was enough to bring the global economy to its knees. The 1973 Arab oil embargo nearly quadrupled the price of crude, from under three dollars a barrel to nearly twelve, and the second shock of 1979 carried it past US$34. By the early 1980s, the price of imported crude in the United States stood at roughly fourteen times its level a decade earlier, and Western economies absorbed double-digit inflation for the better part of a decade. Hence, the stability of the Gulf was the central vulnerability of Western prosperity, and Washington built its regional strategy accordingly.

In March 2026, the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the conduit for a fifth of the world’s crude. However, the effect remained disproportionately modest on oil prices for the most significant war in the Gulf since 1991, compared to previous escalation rounds.

That muted response is the surface of a deeper shift. The oil market has been restructured over the past decade, away from the Gulf and toward the United States, and the war accelerated the move. On 11 June, as the fighting wound down, the United States was confirmed as the world’s largest oil exporter, overtaking a Saudi Arabia and a Russia whose shipments were constrained by the war and sanctions. The country the 1973 embargo once held hostage now sits at the head of the market. The peace deal opens the next phase of that contest under the shadow of a fragile Gulf region, and the US emergence as an alternative supplier.

How Washington Contained the Shock

To hold oil prices down trying to buy domestic and international patience for its military campaign, Washington drew on its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It released 172 million barrels in March as part of a 400-million-barrel release coordinated across IEA member states. Furthermore, American crude has been sold into global markets at a discount as much as US$20.69 a barrel to Brent futures. As a result, the US crude exports already hit record high in May, reaching 5.58 million barrel per day. 

Trump celebrated the shift himself after his visit to China, describing international ships loading up oil from the US Southern states ‘like we’ve never seen before’ and adding that ‘the pain is much less than people thought.’ While the Gulf producers will need time to restore its standing as a reliable supplier in an unstable region, pro-drilling trump policies will turn short-term mitigation efforts into a long-term advantage.

Why the Gulf No Longer Sets the Price

Primarily, the oil shock did not arrive as drastically as expected because of structural changes in the oil market that had been taking shape long before the war. The shares of the Gulf region, the broader OPEC, and the much broader OPEC+ have been in constant decline in favor of the United States which is now the largest producer of petroleum liquids in recorded history.

On total-liquids basis, the US share of global production increased from 15 percent in 2015 to 22 percent in 2025, Pumping more than 23 million barrels a day. On the other side, the share of OPEC+ has moved the other way from 53 percent of the market in 2016 to about 46 percent by 2026, only to be pushed further down by the war. In the past decade alone, the US surpassed the share of the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council combined. Even for crude only, the US market share increased by over 3% during the same period from 10 percent to 13.4 percent.

This advance has embedded structural drivers that it held through the environmental regulation of the Biden years, which marks it as strategy rather than accident. Trump’s relaxed licensing, and indifference to climate constraint have pushed supply further still, in ways not yet fully reflected in price. 

Paired with an aggressive American posture in the oil-rich corners of the Western Hemisphere, from Venezuela to Guyana, Washington will gain pricing influence that may insulate it from the economic costs of its choices in the region.

The Race the Peace Triggers

On the other hand, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz releases the supply the war had stranded. Shut-in production across the region averaged 11.3 million barrels a day in May, and it now returns to a market facing weakening global demand. Meanwhile, OPEC+ keeps loosening its own production limits, trying to recover the market share slipping out of its hands.

It returns to soft demand. China, the swing buyer that once made every Gulf barrel scarce, showed during the war that it can cut crude imports rather than pay up, and that restraint is part of what kept the wartime shock contained. The same restraint now means the market cannot easily absorb both the returning Gulf supply and continued American growth. The two collide over the same marginal barrel.

And American growth is not slowing. The United States, with Guyana, Canada, and Brazil, is expected to drive two-thirds of all global production growth in 2026. Moreover, Washington is building for it. In May, it approved a five-billion-dollar offshore export hub in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico to load larger tankers, and Permian pipeline capacity is set to expand sharply by year’s end. These build-outs are permanent. They commit to defending in peace the export position Washington gained from the war.

The direction of all this, if demand does not recover faster than supply returns, is downward. A market absorbing returning Iranian and Gulf barrels, expanding Western Hemisphere output, pro-fossil policy in Washington, and fresh Venezuelan investment has every ingredient of a price war. While a sustained low price has always been a challenge for American shale, it is also hard for Gulf budgets built on higher breakeven and recovering from a regional war. 

The post Stable Instability and the Coming US-Gulf Contest Over the Oil Market first appeared on Middle East Centre.

Every summer, extreme heat dominates life across Kuwait. It affects public health, increases electricity demand, reduces outdoor productivity, and places growing pressure on urban infrastructure. Climate projections indicate that these challenges will intensify over the coming decades, making adaptation an increasingly important component of national planning. Yet one important question has received surprisingly little attention: will today’s adaptation measures remain effective as climate risks continue to intensify?

This question forms the basis of the present study. Much of the climate adaptation literature focuses on identifying measures that reduce climate risks, including heat warning systems, urban greening, cool roofs, and improvements in building design. While these measures are essential, they are often evaluated as though their effectiveness remains unchanged as climate risks intensify. The study asks whether that assumption holds as extreme heat becomes more persistent and compound heat risks are increasingly shaped by population growth and electricity-system stress. 

Kuwait provides a particularly relevant case study. As one of the world’s hottest countries, it already experiences prolonged periods of extreme summer temperatures and depends heavily on mechanical cooling to sustain daily life. Rising temperatures are accompanied by continued population growth and increasing electricity demand, creating multiple and interconnected pressures on urban systems. Rather than considering rising temperatures in isolation, the analysis examines how climate, population growth, and electricity-system stress interact to produce compound heat risk.

One of the most important findings is that summer nights in Kuwait are warming faster than summer days. Although public attention often focuses on record daytime temperatures, warmer nights have equally significant implications. Cooler nights allow people, buildings, and infrastructure to recover from daytime heat. As nighttime temperatures continue to rise, this recovery period becomes increasingly limited, extending heat exposure beyond daylight hours and increasing cumulative stress on both people and critical infrastructure. Extreme heat therefore becomes more than an episodic event; it evolves into a persistent environmental condition.

These changes have important implications for adaptation planning. Many existing adaptation measures were developed to manage periods of extreme heat, but their effectiveness may change as heat becomes more prolonged and systemic. Air conditioning, for example, provides essential protection against dangerous temperatures and remains indispensable in countries such as Kuwait. At the same time, greater dependence on mechanical cooling increases electricity demand, places additional pressure on power systems, and contributes waste heat to urban environments. Similarly, urban greeningcan reduce local temperatures but requires water resources that are increasingly scarce in hyper-arid environments. Even behavioural measures, including adjustments to outdoor working hours, become more challenging when high nighttime temperatures reduce opportunities for physiological recovery. This does not suggest that adaptation has failed. Rather, it indicates that adaptation should not be viewed as a static process. As climate risks evolve, the effectiveness, feasibility, and timing of adaptation measures may also change. This distinction is important because adaptation planning has traditionally focused on identifying appropriate interventions rather than considering how their performance may vary under progressively warmer climates.

To explore this question, the study develops a framework that links climate science with policy decision-making. Instead of asking only which adaptation measures perform best under current conditions, the framework examines when different measures are likely to provide the greatest benefit and how priorities should evolve as climate risks intensify. The findings indicate that relatively low-cost interventions, such as early heat warning systems and worker protection measures, provide significant benefits in the near term because they can be implemented quickly and directly reduce risks to vulnerable populations. As warming continues, however, longer-term structural investments including urban shading, climate-responsive urban design, electricity system resilience, and carefully planned greening strategies become increasingly important.

More broadly, climate adaptation should be viewed as a dynamic process rather than a fixed set of interventions. Governments should not only identify effective adaptation measures but also consider how these measures interact with changing climatic conditions and with other urban systems. Decisions about sequencing adaptation investments may therefore become just as important as decisions about selecting individual interventions.

Although the study focuses on Kuwait, its implications extend beyond a single country. Many cities across the Middle East and other hyper-arid regions are experiencing rising temperatures, rapid population growth, and increasing dependence on cooling infrastructure. As these pressures intensify, the challenge is no longer simply to identify effective adaptation measures, but to understand how their effectiveness may change under increasingly extreme climate conditions. Kuwait therefore provides valuable insights into the adaptation challenges that other heat-exposed cities are likely to face.

Climate adaptation is not a one-time response to a changing climate; it is a continuous process that must evolve as risks change. Recognising that adaptation measures may have practical limits under increasingly extreme conditions can help policymakers move beyond short-term responses towards more resilient, forward-looking strategies. For Kuwait and other rapidly warming cities, planning means not only adapting to climate change but also anticipating how adaptation itself must evolve.

The post When Climate Adaptation Reaches Its Limits: Lessons from Kuwait’s Extreme Heat first appeared on Middle East Centre.

Parliaments can aid peacebuilding and transitional justice processes not only through their legislative functions but also as democratic mechanisms where different views over conflicted periods are represented, contributing to dialogue and social consensus on peaceful co-existence. In this blog post, we focus on one such parliamentary mechanism in Turkey – the National Solidarity, Fraternity and Democracy Commission (hereafter, the Commission) established under the Grand National Assembly of Turkey – specifically regarding civil society participation, gender equality, and transitional justice demands. We draw on findings from our September 2025 report on the Commission as an ad-hoc mechanism, published by the DEMOS Research Collective, as well as recent developments in the peace process.

Turkey’s New Peace Process and the Commission

The peace process between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has been progressing slowly, with few concrete steps by the government until now. Announced unexpectedly by the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) coalition partner, the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli in October 2024, the process has largely unfolded through top-down and backdoor negotiations, with clear tensions on expectations from this process. The government has adopted a strictly securitised conceptualisation of peace, what they call ‘Terror-free Turkey’, focused entirely on demilitarisation. This is an extension of the Turkish state’s historical securitisation of the so-called Kurdish issue and the current government’s intensified crackdown on the Kurdish political movement amidst a decade of worsening authoritarianism. In contrast, the PKK has put forward a vision of ‘Peace and Democratic Society’, seeking to address certain inequalities that led to the conflict. Despite these fundamental disagreements, negotiations are proceeding, albeit slowly. Following jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan’s call to lay down arms in February 2025 and the party’s decision to disarm and disband in May 2025, a group of PKK members symbolically burned weapons in southern Kurdistan with civil society representatives present as observers in a historic ceremony in July 2025.

Partly responding to calls to ground and secure the process democratically, the Commission was established in August 2025 as an informal parliamentary body, consisting of MPs from all but one parties represented in the Parliament. Per its bylaws, the Commission’s objectives were ‘to completely remove terrorism from Turkey’s agenda, strengthen social cohesion, reinforce our national unity and brotherhood, and undertake efforts in the areas of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law’ through working on legislative proposals and informing the broader public on the process.

As the only tangible mechanism through which civil society could contribute, the Commission raised expectations that this peace process could promote democratisation after all. Yet its mission and working methods remained unclear, even to its own members. Established almost a year into the process, it offered an official but invitation-only channel for civil society and conflict-affected groups to present their views, inevitably raising questions about access and inclusion.

Following 21 sessions in which a total of 137 persons were heard, the Commission concluded its work in February 2026 – a surprisingly short amount of time for a Commission with such ambitious goals. Its concluding report reflected the ‘terror-free Turkey’ framework, with its language heavily securitised; it provided broad recommendations regarding legislative proposals for the peace process, such as demilitarisation, reintegration, and legal assurances to those involved in the negotiations. Importantly, the report only briefly touched upon democratisation demands, recommending (in a total of four pages) strengthening fundamental rights and freedoms and reforming the penal execution regime and the counter-terrorism framework, among others. It made no mention of cultural rights, for instance. The report highlighted a ‘unique and national perspective,’ supported by government representatives’ repeated emphasis on a home-grown process with zero interference from third party countries, mediators, or guarantors. While locally grounded and context-specific processes are essential, this framing also suggests an attempt to retain total political control over the process through an authoritarian conflict management approach, limiting broader participation and scrutiny. Despite being framed as a home-grown process, there has been little meaningful space for community actors, victims, and survivors to shape its direction.

The Commission’s work reflects this limitation. It failed to generate social ownership of the Commission’s work or the peace process, rather functioning largely as a platform to collect demands without concrete next steps. The lack of meaningful participation, insufficient attention to gender, and the failure to address transitional justice demands undermined the Commission’s legitimacy and led to a missed opportunity to socialise this peace process.

What is Missing from the Commission’s Work?

Firstly, the participation of affected groups and communities and civil society remained symbolic. While the Commission heard a range of voices, it excluded others and failed to ensure meaningful participation. The criteria used to determine invitees was unclear, with the final list appearing to represent a middle ground. For instance, among the first to be invited were organisations of soldiers and law enforcement and their families, as well as the Saturday Mothers/People (movement of activists and families of the forcibly disappeared) and the Peace Mothers (movement by mostly Kurdish mothers who lost their children in the conflict). However, the Commission did not permit Peace Mother Nezahat Teke to address the Commission in her mother tongue, reproducing structural inequalities against the Kurdish language and identity. Meanwhile, LGBTI+ organisations were not invited despite having been recommended by some political parties and the LGBTI+ movement’s enthusiastic engagement with the process, which is unsurprising given the government’s targeting of this community. These examples demonstrate the boundaries of acceptable inclusion within the process.

Secondly, attention to gender equality was lacking both in the Commission’s structure and outputs. Although women’s and LGBTI+ movements have consistently asserted their role in peacebuilding and insisted on being included from the outset, only 9 of the 51 Commission members were women, and while some women’s and youth organisations participated in hearings, the final report makes no reference to gender equality or a gendered perspective on conflict and peacebuilding. This absence is not simply a matter of representation but reflects a broader rejection to integrate gender as a substantive dimension of disarmament and the peace process amidst the government’s worsening anti-gender politics.

Thirdly, the Commission barely engaged with transitional justice demands, even with regards to enforced disappearances, one of the issues raised by victims-survivors of the conflict in their initial submissions. The Saturday Mothers, during the 5^th session, demanded truth and justice for their forcibly disappeared relatives, accountability of perpetrators, and the establishment of a truth commission under the Commission. Despite the wide media coverage of this session and the significance of these demands in building a democratic future for the country, the final report made no reference to transitional justice mechanisms, truth commissions, or dealing with the past. This represents one of the Commission’s most significant shortcomings, especially given the centrality of truth and justice demands among those most affected by the conflict.

Conclusion

Although the Commission initially raised expectations that injustices at the heart of the conflict would be publicly and substantively addressed, its work remained limited. Rather than transforming participation into influence, it appears to have functioned largely as a mechanism to appease communities affected by the conflict and respond to broader social opposition to authoritarianism. Despite the opportunities that this formal space for participation presented for peacebuilding, the Commission showed once again that formalistic participation does not equal meaningful inclusion or impact. The Commission appears to have failed the objectives it set for itself to strengthen social cohesion and promote democratisation.

This also raises questions about the broader parliamentary and political context. The effectiveness of such ad hoc mechanisms depends on political will and genuine openness to pluralism. In the current context of systemic weakening of the opposition, evidenced most recently by the politically motivated court decision to remove Özgür Özel, the elected chair of the main opposition party, and the crackdown on social movements opposing the NATO Summit held in Ankara, the Commission reflects the limits of parliamentary involvement in peace negotiations by a government with no political will for democratisation. In the meantime, the key legal framework for the advancement of disarmament is expected to be brought to the parliament before the summer recess. This new legislation is likely to affect thousands of individuals including the PKK fighters, those imprisoned for PKK-related charges, and those in exile, therefore will mark a crucial milestone in the peace process. However, there are concerns that the government’s proposed legislation may have a narrow scope on laying down arms rather than paving the way for democratisation, pointing yet again to differing expectations and conceptualisations.

Considering the failures of the Commission that was tasked with contributing to social cohesion, democracy, and freedom, there appears little prospect that the proposed legislation will account for ways forward for democracy and social peace. Without civil society taking ownership and victim-survivor groups becoming leading actors, this ‘unique and national’ process risks remaining confined to a top-down framework, which will hinder any possibility of achieving sustainable peace.

The post How Turkey’s Parliamentary Peace Commission Failed its Democratic Promises first appeared on Middle East Centre.

Despite several decades of investment and repeated reform initiatives, Kuwait’s education system has struggled to achieve notable improvement in its quality. The number of reforms and initiatives that have been announced or partially implemented is uncountable, creating an endless cycle of education reform. This raises a critical question: why do reforms in Kuwait repeatedly struggle to be translated into effective practice? This blog posits that the answer lies not in the design of the reforms but in the governance structures, institutional arrangements, and decision-making processes that underpin the education system. Accordingly, it examines how educational governance in Kuwait shapes the design, implementation, and outcomes of education reform, and why several reform efforts have failed to deliver real and lasting change. 

The importance of this research extends beyond education policy alone. Education reform is a key component of the broader goal, as articulated in the New Kuwait Vision 2035, of diversifying the country’s oil-based economy and transitioning to a more sustainable economy. The development of human capital is a central pillar of this vision, and achieving a high level of human capital would definitely require a high quality of education system, yet all the efforts to improve this quality have not accomplished it. This makes the question of education reform a national priority and not a ministerial priority. And without successful reform, the achievement of the New Kuwait Vision would be harder than we expected, if not impossible. 

International reports, including those by the IMF and the OECD, consistently highlight weaknesses in governance – such as institutional fragmentation, limited coordination, weak accountability, and slow policy implementation – as major constraints on reform across the public sector generally. These findings mirror patterns observed in Kuwait’s education sector, where high ministerial turnover, overlapping responsibilities, and inadequate monitoring systems have contributed to what I have described as ‘uncompleted reforms’. Understanding how governance operates within the education system is therefore essential not only for improving educational outcomes but also for advancing Kuwait’s wider economic and institutional reform agenda.

What distinguishes this articulation of the problem from others is its explicit focus on governance as the missing link between reform plans and reform outcomes. Rather than evaluating individual reform programmes, curricula, or initiatives in isolation, analysing the architecture of educational governance itself – including the distribution of authority, the role and autonomy of key institutions, and the political and bureaucratic dynamics that shape decision-making. Thus, the focus moves beyond technical explanations for reform failure to situate education policy within the broader context of Kuwait’s governance and political economy.

Educational governance – the structures, actors, and processes through which educational decisions are made and implemented – plays a central role in shaping reform outcomes. Globally and regionally, governance has become a central element of education policy as systems seek to navigate increasing complexity, rising accountability demands, and pressures to improve institutional performance. As a result, governance issues have moved up political and policy agendas, and countries are increasingly working to establish a governing model that fits their own needs.

 In Kuwait, governance remains highly centralised within the Ministry of Education and is characterised by limited delegation of authority and complex bureaucratic layers. This was the case of the education system since its establishment in the 1940s, which was a highly understandable governance style due to the limited number of schools and students and the simplicity of the system. However, the complexity and expansion of the education system today require a new governance style. Based on recent Ministry of Education statistics, there are around 1,232 schools, 105,453 teachers, and 516, 966 students. While in higher education, there are 2 public and around 14 private universities. It will be almost impossible to govern this system through a centralised approach, as some studies in Kuwait have warned against increased centralisation, which might affect the system’s quality and mechanisms. Ministries must no longer be the only actors involved in governing the education system. 

Although several institutions were established in Kuwait to support policy development and quality assurance – such as the Supreme Education Council (SEC), the National Center for Educational Development (NCED), and the National Bureau for Academic Accreditation and Education Quality Assurance (NBAQ) – their effectiveness has been constrained by structural dependence on ministerial authority.

The SEC, established in 1984 as an advisory body, lacks independence as it is chaired by the Minister of Education, who appoints its members and determines when it is convened. In fact, no new council members have been appointed since 2018, and the SEC has played no role in major decisions, including the suspension of schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, the NCED, created in 2006 to lead educational reforms, suffered continuously from leadership instability, limited autonomy, and extensive ministerial interference; instead of fixing these issues, the Minister of Education abolished the centre in September 2025. The NBAQ faces comparable challenges; despite its mandate to assure quality in higher education, it remains structurally dependent on the Ministry of Higher Education and has not conducted quality assessments of Kuwait’s higher education institutions since it was established in 2010.

Collectively, these cases illustrate how centralisation and weak institutional autonomy undermine educational governance in Kuwait. The subordination of key governance bodies to ministerial authority has limited their ability to function effectively, thus contributing to the fragmented reform efforts and persistent implementation failures across the education sector. 

The past several attempts to reform the education system have focused too heavily on the operational needs of day-to-day schooling while neglecting the broader question of re-governing the education sector. Re-governing the education system should be regarded as a foundational step toward achieving meaningful reform and improving educational quality. Given the complexity of the education system, there is a need for a new governance structure that redistributes authority, strengthens accountability, and enables the meaningful participation of diverse stakeholders.

The post Re-Governing Education in Kuwait: A New Era of Reform first appeared on Middle East Centre.