Our mission is to:

• Support and facilitate innovative and interdisciplinary research and teaching about the Middle East, North Africa, and the Islamic World.
  
  
• Expand public discourse about the Middle East and North Africa beyond socio-political analysis to include more sustained engagement with the complexities of this culturally dynamic region through public programming, support of curricular innovation, fostering of interdisciplinary collaboration, and promotion of cultural diversity.
  
  
• Train undergraduate, graduate, and professional specialists on the Middle East, North Africa and the Islamic world, and develop deep cultural and linguistic competency.
  
  
• Disseminate knowledge about the countries and cultures of the Middle East and North Africa through academic and public programming, and scholarly publications.
  
  
• Promote global citizenship, cultural diversity, and diversity of perspectives through the support of K-12 curriculum enhancement and educator professional development.

Our Vision

CNES’ vision is to reframe the way that the MENA region has been traditionally represented, approached by many scholars, and taught as a subject in higher education through the emphasis on: 1) cultural diversity, 2) interdisciplinary collaboration, and 3) curricular innovation.

The MENA region has often been viewed through a narrow political lens that imposes a reductive binary of crisis and stasis as the primary analytic frame. From popular media accounts to area studies scholarship, topics like terrorism, civil war, youth uprising, religious conflict, and official corruption have been given center stage. This approach risks misrepresenting inevitable processes of social change as symptoms of underlying pathology. Moreover, a myopic focus on moments of political crisis can obscure the rich cultural traditions, histories, and practices that have produced not only conflict in the region but also cultural and political movements that have questioned and, in significant ways, redefined the meaning of progress itself.

Highlighting diverse scholarship that draws on innovative analytic approaches from fields such as critical historiography, humanistic social science, imaginative literature, and visual culture, our initiatives aim to challenge static views of the region and to advance nuanced understandings of the new MENA.

Our Core Values

Scholarly excellence; inclusion and cultural diversity; service to UCLA students and faculty, community outreach.