Kawaakibi’s greatest strength is that our team are not only activists, but intellectuals actively engaged in shaping the ideas of the future. This programme gives the organisation a permanent engine of influence and promotion of ideas.
Our region of concern is the MENA. It's a region that defies definition by ethnicity, language, religion, culture, or even geography. An ancient region whose recent history is full of trauma and resistance; disillusionment and revolution. But it's also where stories of love, loss, and heroism were first written.
For the longest time, the story of our region - who we are, how we got here, and what our future should look like - has been written by the very authoritarian forces that suppress us. As a result, our region has been consistently talked about through the prism of ideology, politics, and conflict. This is problematic. The language of politics and ideology is often dehumanising, and ends up presenting us as a problem to be solved rather than a beauty to be shared.
Human beings are a storytelling species. There is radical power in owning, writing, and telling our own story, a power greater and more fundamental than that of ideologies, political programmes, or policy recommendations. It’s dignifying, it’s ambitious, and it’s humanising. To write our own story lies at the centre of liberation. There's amazing power to be unlocked when a critical mass of people see the future together.
At Kawaakibi, we seek to further this power once unlocked through a plethora of ways which result in knowledge production and owning our own narrative.
Our current Research and Knowledge Production projects are spread across our Narrative, Commentary, Research functions.
Narrative:
- Arab Tyrant Manual
- Intergalactic Tarboush
Research:
- Activism Paradigm
- Islamic Economics
- Middle East Crisis Factor