SOAS has relaunched the SOAS Middle East Institute (originally founded in 2002 as the London Middle East Institute) at an event where its inaugural Research Associate, Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi delivered a public lecture about the work on women artists from the Arab world.

The institute is led by Professor Lina Khatib, MBI Al Jaber Chair in Middle East Studies, and aims to foster engagement in the Middle East through its research and outreach across art and culture, heritage and history, environment and energy, political economy, public policy, and politics.

SOAS Vice-Chancellor Adam Habib said: “We are relaunching the Institute at a time when great challenges facing the Middle East are at the forefront of our minds. The Institute represents precisely the kind of collaboration we need to nurture and grow to understand and provide answers to such challenges, routed in engagement with the region’s rich history as well as its present and future.”

SOAS has launched two equitable, joint Masters programmes with universities in India, which welcome their first students in September.

The MA Global Urban Sociology, developed jointly with Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence (SNIoE), and the MA/LLM Environmental Justice in South Asia, developed with the National Law University Delhi (NLUD), allow students to study at both SOAS and in India. Each has a single fee for students wherever they are from, which is around half the typical international tuition fee at UK universities. Both are one-year programmes, which provide students with the opportunity to engage in the issues from the South-North perspective. Students will receive a joint MA from SOAS and SNIoE or NLUD (depending on the programme).

These new degrees are part of SOAS' commitment to developing equitable partnerships with universities in the Global South and follow the collaboration with the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (PhD Applied Economics).

SOAS anthropologists have secured a Research England grant worth nearly £8 million to help reshape mental health care in London and globally.

The team led by Professor David Mosse and Dr Nikita Simpson will develop wide-ranging research partnerships to understand and address inequalities in access to mental health care, challenges in provision and deficits in the experience and overall outcomes of care.

In September 2024, SOAS will launch the Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action - the first discipline-specific anthropology and mental health centre in the world.

The funding comes from Research England’s Expanding Excellence in England Fund which identifies research units recognised as excellent and having the potential to grow. Funding will run for five years from the 2024-2025 academic year.

We welcomed back SOAS alumnus - and the first historian of African heritage to become a professor of history in Britain – Professor Hakim Adi to deliver a lecture marking the launch of the SOAS Pan African Centre.

The Centre aims to be a platform for promoting interdisciplinary research, policy dialogues and public engagement on issues related to the African continent and its diaspora. Its work will examine the history of the concept of Pan-Africanism, exploring its evolution, its significance in anti-colonial and anti-racist movements, as well as its contemporary relevance in black activism and regional and continental policymaking.

Fittingly, Professor Adi’s lecture focussed on the history of Pan-Africanism highlighting the pivotal role of British-based activists in the emergence of modern Pan-Africanism since the founding of the African Association in 1897.

Professor Philippe Cullet, SOAS Professor of International and Environmental Law, and Chair of the SOAS Law, Environment and Development Centre, has been awarded a European Research Council fund worth €2.48million for his project on water conflicts and security in South Asia.

The climate crisis is increasingly directly linked to fast increasing water scarcity in many parts of the world. This scarcity directly threatens the realisation of the human right to water. In a context of finite availability of freshwater, this leads to conflicts between different water users.

The WATCON project focuses on the legal aspects of water allocation to prevent sectoral water conflicts and to foster resolution. The project will contribute to debates around water security and the human right to water. Its scientific contribution will emerge from close engagement with the legal aspects of water conflicts by examining them in their local to global dimensions, with a focus on South Asia.