Rebuilding a Life in the Wake of Revolution: A Conversation with Qutaiba Idlbi

On our September 21 episode, Middle Eastern foreign policy expert Joshua Landis joins Suzette Grillot for our weekly roundtable discussion. Then, we speak with Qutaiba Idlbi, a Syrian activist who recently visited Oklahoma to speak about the future of Middle Eastern democracy.

Joshua Landis is the Sandra Mackey Chair in Middle East Studies and Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He has taught courses for a number of institutions including the National Security Agency and Princeton University since obtaining his PhD in Near East Studies from Princeton. He has spent significant time living and researching in the Middle East, and currently runs Syria Comment, a web newsletter on Syrian politics and history with over 50,000 monthly readers.

Qutaiba Idlbi is a non-resident fellow at the Global Policy Institute, where he specializes in education and security policy in the Middle East. He also serves as a board member at Paper Airplanes, a non-profit organization which helps refugee youth practice English and complete their educations. In 2013, he co-founded People Demand Change, an organization dedicated to bringing activists, media, and governance structures together to provide long-term support to civil society activists. Idlbi was forced to flee to the United States after being detained and tortured multiple times in Damascus following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war.