Image credit: REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani

About the speakers:

Harith Hasan is a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, where his research focuses on Iraq, sectarianism, identity politics, religious actors, and state-society relations. Hasan holds a PhD in political science from Sant’Anna School for Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy and an MA in political communication from the University of Leeds. Prior to joining Carnegie, he was a senior research fellow at the Central European University and a co-director for the project, “Striking from the Margins: Religion, State and Disintegration in the Middle East.” Before that, Hasan was also a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council where he led their Iraq Program, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, and a post-doctoral fellow at Brandeis University. Hasan has published articles, essays, and papers in both English and Arabic media, including the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Maydan, The Levantine Review, Le Monde Diplomatique (English edition) and others.

Abstract:

Dr Hasan's talk will focus on the evolution of the political role of Shia religious authority in Iraq and the overall transformation in the relations between the state and religious actors. It will also highlight the impact of state weakness, intra-Shia rivalries and recent political changes (including the last election) on the Shia religious authority and its role in the public sphere. 

Hayder al-Khoei is a doctoral researcher at the University of Exeter, where he focuses on U.S. foreign policy and ethno-sectarian politics in Iraq. He is a former fellow at Chatham House and the European Council on Foreign Relations, where he worked on political and security challenges in post-ISIS Iraq.

Renad Mansour is Research Fellow in the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House. His research explores the situation of Iraq in transition and the dilemmas posed by state-building. He is also a research fellow at the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani and at the Cambridge Security Initiative based at Cambridge University. He has has held positions as Lecturer of International Studies and Supervisor at the Faculty of Politics also at Cambridge and the LSE. He holds a PhD in international relations from Pembroke College, Cambridge.