Mikhail Lecture - “Power Without Order: Gaza, Iran, and the Remaking of the Middle East”

About

The UToledo Judith Herb College of Arts, Social Sciences and Education welcomes Yale law professor, Asli Ü. Bâli, as the guest speaker for the 2026 Maryse and Ramzy Mikhail Memorial Lecture.

TOPIC “Power Without Order: Gaza, Iran, and the Remaking of the Middle East”

(Description provided by Dr. Asli Ü. Bâli) “The Middle East is undergoing a profound reordering. The United States remains the region’s most powerful external actor, and Israel possesses overwhelming military superiority, yet neither power has been able to translate coercive capacity into a stable regional settlement. Instead, the wars in Gaza and Iran have exposed the limits of a security architecture increasingly dependent on military force and economic pressure while offering fewer mechanisms for durable political resolution.

Using the Iran war as a prism through which to understand these broader changes, this lecture examines the emergence of a more fragmented regional order. New security relationships are developing alongside older American guarantees; economic interdependence has itself become a source of strategic leverage; and the boundaries between war and peace, military and economic coercion, and alliance and autonomy are becoming increasingly blurred. The lecture asks what the transformations underway in the region mean for Palestinian self-determination, regional security, and nuclear proliferation in a Middle East whose old organizing assumptions are rapidly coming apart.”

About the Speaker Bâli is the Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she is director of graduate studies, faculty co-director of the Schell Center for Human Rights and faculty co-director of the Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization. Prior to joining Yale, she was a professor of law at UCLA, founding faculty director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights and director of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies.

Her teaching and research focus on public international law — particularly human rights law — and comparative constitutional law, with a focus on the Middle East. She is widely published in leading law journals, peer-reviewed social science journals and is co-editor of two volumes on comparative law published by Cambridge University Press. She is past president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (2023-25), co-chair of the Advisory Board for the Middle East Division of Human Rights Watch, nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and serves on the editorial board of the American Journal of International Law.