History
Biography
Shahram Akbarzadeh is Research Professor of Middle East & Central Asian Politics and holds the prestigious ARC Future Fellowship.
He has an active research interest in the politics of Central Asia, Islam, Muslims in Australia and the Middle East. He has been involved in organising a number of key conferences, including a Chatham House rule workshop on Australia's relations with Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan (2007), sponsored by the International Centre of Excellence for Asia Pacific Studies, and a conference on the Arab Revolution with Freedom House, sponsored by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).
In 2000 Professor Akbarzadeh was the Middle East Studies conference co-convener and served as the Central and West Asia Councillor for the Asian Studies Association of Australia (1999-2004). He has promoted Asian studies through contacts with industry and the academia by research and publication. He guest edited a special issue of Asian Studies Review on the Middle East (Vol.25, No.2, 2001) and a special issue of the Journal of Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies on Globalization (Vol. 5, No.2, 2000).
He has published more than 40 refereed papers. Among his latest publications are a sole-authored book on Uzbekistan and the United States, a co-authored book on US Foreign Policy in the Middle East, and a co-authored book on Muslim Active Citizenship in the West.
Professor Akbarzadeh is the founding Editor of the Islamic Studies Series, published by Melbourne University Press, and a regular public commentator. He has produced key reports for the Australian Research Council (ARC) on Australian based scholarship on Islam, and also for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) on Muslim Voices and Mapping Employment and Education; and has produced a report on Islam in the Australian media. He acted as Convenor of the Islam Node for the ARC Asia Pacific Futures Research Network.
He is a member of the Editorial Board of four leading refereed journals: Global Change, Peace & Security, the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, the Journal of Asian Security & International Affairs, and Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs; and an International Advisory Board member of the World Journal of Islamic History and Civilization.
Bassam Tibi, is a German political scientist and Professor of International Relations. He was born in 1944 in Damascus, Syria to an aristocratic family, and moved to Germany in 1962 where he later became a citizen in 1976. He is known for his analysis of international relations and the introduction of Islam to the study of international conflict and of civilization. Tibi is known for introducing the controversial concept of European Leitkultur as well as the concept of Euroislam to discussions about integration of Muslim immigrants to countries in Europe. He is also the founder of Islamology as a social-scientific study of Islam and conflict in post-bipolar politics. Tibi has done research in Asian and African countries. He publishes in English, German and Arabic.
Islam is the dominant religion in Uzbekistan. Despite its predominance, the practice of Islam is far from monolithic. Many versions of the faith have been practiced in Uzbekistan. Most of them stray far from conventional Islamic tradition and law, and practice a far more relaxed approach. Heavily authoritarian interpretations of the Qur’an, including Shariah Law, as seen in parts of the Middle East, are almost unheard of in Uzbekistan. Many traditions descend from the Zoroastrian era, before the introduction of Islam to the country.
Middle Eastern studies is a name given to a number of academic programs associated with the study of the history, culture, politics, economies, and geography of the Middle East, an area that is generally interpreted to cover a range of nations including Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Oman. It is considered a form of area studies, taking an overtly interdisciplinary approach to the study of a region. In this sense Middle Eastern studies is a far broader and less traditional field than classical Islamic studies.
Khaled Abou el Fadl is the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law where he has taught courses on International Human Rights, Islamic jurisprudence, National Security Law, Law and Terrorism, Islam and Human Rights, Political Asylum, and Political Crimes and Legal Systems. He is also the Chair of the Islamic Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has lectured on and taught Islamic law in the United States and Europe in academic and non-academic environments since approximately 1990.
Turkish Australians or Australian Turks are Turkish people who have immigrated to Australia. However, the term may also refer to Australian-born persons who have Turkish parents or who have a Turkish ancestral background.
Ishtiaq Ahmed is a Swedish political scientist and author of Pakistani descent. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Stockholm University. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Government College University, Lahore.He was a Visiting Professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) during 2013-2015.. He is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Stockholm University. He is also Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. He was a Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), National University of Singapore and at the South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore from June 2007 to June 2010..
The term Madheshi people is ambiguous. Anthropologists use the term for people of Indian ancestry residing in the Terai of Nepal and comprising various cultural groups such as Hindu caste groups, muslims, merchants and indigenous people of the Terai. In recent times, some politicians and journalists use the term for all Nepali citizens of the Terai.
Merlyna Lim is a scholar studying ICT, particularly on the socio-political shaping of new media in non-Western contexts. She has been appointed a Canada Research Chair in Digital Media and Global Network Society in the School of Journalism and Communication Carleton University. Formerly she was a Visiting Research Scholar at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy and a Distinguished Scholar of Technology and Public Engagement of the School of Social Transformation Justice and Social Inquiry Program and the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. She previously held a Networked Public Research Associate position at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She received her PhD, with distinction, from University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands, with a dissertation entitled @rchipelago Online: The Internet and Political Activism in Indonesia.
Riaz Hassan AM, FASSA is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow and Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology, Flinders University.
Michael Leifer CMG was a British International Relations scholar specialising in the politics and international relations of South East Asia.
While anti-Zionism usually utilizes ethnic and political arguments against the existence or policies of the state of Israel, anti-Zionism has also been expressed within religious contexts which have, at times, colluded and collided with the ethnopolitical arguments over Israel's legitimacy. Outside of the liberal and socialist fields of anti-Zionist currents, the religious arguments tend to predominate as the driving ideological power within the incumbent movements and organizations, and usually target the Israeli state's relationship with Judaism.
John Thayer Sidel is a political scientist and is the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he is affiliated with both the Department of Government and International Relations department, as well as the Asia Research Centre.
Carool Kersten is Dutch historian of Islam and the author and editor of eleven books. Trained as an Arabist, Southeast Asianist and scholar of religion, he currently works as a Reader in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World at King's College London, teaching in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, as well as at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, where he was also acting head of department in 2017. In his research he focuses on the contemporary Muslim world, in particular intellectual history and current developments in both regional and global contexts. In addition to that, he is interested in Southeast Asian history and Islam, and in developments in the Middle East.
Suad Joseph. Dr. Joseph received her doctorate in Anthropology from Columbia University in 1975. Dr. Joseph is Professor of Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies at the University of California, Davis and current President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. Her research addresses issues of gender; families, children, and youth; sociology of the family; and selfhood, citizenship, and the state in the Middle East, with a focus on her native Lebanon. Her earlier work focused on the politicization of religion in Lebanon. Joseph is the founder of the Middle East Research Group in Anthropology, the founder and coordinator of the Arab Families Working Group, the founder of the Association for Middle East Women's Studies, the General Editor of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, and the Founding Director of the Middle East/South Asian Studies Program at the University of California at Davis. She is also the founder and facilitator of a six-university consortium of the American University of Beirut, American University in Cairo, Lebanese American University, University of California at Davis, and Birzeit University Consortium.
Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the Science Council of the International Panel on Social Progress, and a former recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for the study of sovereignty and citizenship. She is well known for her interdisciplinary approach in investigations of globalization, modernity, and citizenship from Southeast Asia and China to the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Her notions of 'flexible citizenship', 'graduated sovereignty,' and 'global assemblages' have widely impacted conceptions of the global in modernity across the social sciences and humanities.
Damien Kingsbury, is an Australian academic specializing in political and security issues in Southeast Asia.
Abdullah Saeed is an Australian academic and scholar of Islamic studies who is currently the Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is particularly known for his progressive views on religious freedom in Islam and has been translated into several languages.
David Menashri is an Israeli professor and scholar of modern Iranian history. A leading Iranian expert, he is also the founding director of The Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University.
Zahra Kamalkhani is an Iranian anthropologist.
Ashok Swain is an Indian-born academic and professor of peace and conflict research at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University. In 2017, he was appointed as the UNESCO Chair of International Water Cooperation and became the first UNESCO Chair of Uppsala University. Swain received his PhD in 1991 from the School of International Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Ashok Swain has been a Mac Arthur Fellow at the University of Chicago, visiting fellow at UN Research Institute for Social Development, Geneva; and visiting professor at University Witwatersrand, University of Science, Malaysia, University of British Columbia, University of Maryland, Stanford University, McGill University, Tufts University and University of Natural Sciences and Life Sciences, Vienna. He has written extensively on new security challenges, water sharing issues, environment, conflict and peace, and democratic development issues. He has published 20 books, more than 100 journal articles, and book chapters. Swain has worked as a policy consultant on the environment, water, development and migration issues for various UN agencies and Governments of Sweden, Netherlands, UK, and Singapore. He also writes and comments frequently on South Asian Politics and Religious Fundamentalism.
