Asfari Institute Inaugural Conference: New Spaces of Civil Society Activism in the Arab World (Beirut, 23-24 May)

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Asfari Institute Inaugural Conference: New Spaces of Civil Society Activism in the Arab World (Beirut, 23-24 May)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship presents

The Asfari Institute Inaugural Conference on Civic Participation and Citizenship:

New Spaces of Civil Society Activism in the Arab World

The Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship is honored to invite you to its inaugural two-day conference on Thursday and Friday May 23-24, 2013 (8:30 am to 5:00 pm) at the American Unversity of Beirut, College Hall, B1 Auditorium. The conference is held in partnership with the Arab Studies Consortium (Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, Arab Studies Institute at George Mason University) and Legal Agenda Beirut. This inaugural conference aims to commerce a rigorous engagement with matters of civic participation and citizenship, to interrogate the impact of civil society on the changing region, and to trace the most promising prospects for rights-based advocacy. The conference revolves around presentations and panel sessions by more than twenty-five invited practitioners, academics and activists from many countries.

Jadaliyya will be live tweeting the conference. Follow the Twitter hashtag #AICC2013 for live updates.

Conference Topic

Durable authoritarianism in the Arab world has been shaken by political revolutions across the region. Starting in Tunisia in December 2010 and spreading quickly to Egypt and beyond, the outbreak of mass protest movements was seemingly sudden, they reflect longer histories of civil society mobilizations. The existence of older and more conventional kinds of institutions, such as labor unions, political parties, and social welfare organizations, was critical to adding discipline, legitimacy and a history of activism into the mix of spontaneous protests. The ongoing revolts have produced new actors and spaces, and they certainly demonstrate the popular unwillingness to accept a status quo ante.

These mass protests were animated above all by demands for political and civil rights, respect and dignity, and opposition to corruption and economic exploitation. The underlying and unifying sentiment of these protests was a demand for state reform and for more robust means of civic engagement and participation. Even in countries where there have been regime changes, the struggles continue because people’s demands and expectations have yet to be satisfied. The objective of this conference is to air and analyze how changes over the last two years are reconfiguring the boundaries of state and society and the meaning of citizenship.

We are bringing together practitioners, academics, and activists from many countries to interrogate the impact of political transformations and social changes on the region. Among the issues we invite participants to examine and explain are: how conceptions of citizenship are being (re)formulated in terms of rights claims and the politics of inclusion and exclusion; how constitutions in particular and the law in general have constituted terrains of struggle; how alliances and/or conflicts are framed through and mobilized around gender, sexuality, generation, class, rural-urban divides, and communitarian and sectarian identities; how popular culture and social media have contributed to and reflected collective mobilizations; how protests have been affected by war, militarization, and securitization, including, in some places, counter-revolutionary repression; and how the protests  have produced various kinds of regional and transnational interferences as well as solidarities across borders.

As the launching event for the new Asfari Institute, we hope the conference can initiate productive engagements about these matters and serve as a platform for future work.

Conference Program 

Day 1: 23 May 2013

8:30–9:00am Registration and Coffee
  

9:00–9:15am Welcoming Remarks

  • Ahmad Dallal, Provost of AUB
Marieke Bosman, Asfari Foundation

9:15–10:00am Keynote

  • Asef Bayat, University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign, 
Everyday Life and Arab Revolutions

10:00–10:30am  Coffee Break

10:30am–12:30pm Panel: Civic Struggles in Turbulent Times

  • Bassam Haddad, George Mason University
  • Joel Beinin, Stanford University  
  • Abla Amawi, UNDP-Program of Assistance to the Palestinian People
  • Ala’a Shehabi, Bahrain Watch
  • Moderated by Lisa Hajjar, University of California – Santa Barbara, AUB

12:30–1:30pm  Buffet Lunch (College Hall, Auditorium B1)

1:30–2:15 pm Keynote

  • Khaled Fahmy, American University of Cairo, 
Transitional Justice in Post-Revolutionary Egypt

2:15–4:15 pm Panel: Debating Justice

  • Maged Almadhaji, Center for Civil Rights and Democracy (Yemen) 
  • Afif Jaidi, Lawyer (Tunisia)
  • Abdulhay Sayed, Lawyer (Syria)
  • Yassine Moukhli, Club Des Magistrats Du Marco
  • Moderated by Nizar Sagieh, Chair, Legal Agenda

4:15–4:45pm Coffee Break

4:45–5:30pm Keynote

  • Walden Bello, House of Representatives – Republic of Philippines, Thoughts on the Arab Spring from the Perspective of Other Episodes of Democratization

 

Day 2: 24 May 2013

8:30–9:00 am Coffee

9:00–11:00am Panel: Battling for Rights


  • Ray Jureidini, Qatar Foundation

  • Charbel Nahas, Former Minister of Labor (Lebanon)

  • Islah Jad, Birzeit University

  • Atiaf Alwazir, Independent researcher and activist (Yemen)

  • Moderated by Sari Hanafi, AUB

11:00–11:30am Coffee Break

11:30am-12:15pm Keynote

  • Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University, 
Geopolitical Considerations for Democracy Struggles in the Arab World

12:15–1:30pm Midday Break

1:30–3:30pm Panel: New Actors and Novel Approaches


  • Karima Khalil, Medical doctor and photographer (Egypt)

  • Nadir Bouhmouch, Student and documentary filmmaker (Morocco)

  • Irada Al Jabbouri, University of Baghdad

  • Samah Idriss, Al-Adab publishing
  • Moderated by 
Dina Kiwan, AUB

3:30–4:00pm Coffee Break 

4:00–5:30pm Roundtable with Keynote Speakers and Provost   

  • Asef Bayat
  • Walden Bello
  • Khaled Fahmy
  • Rashid Khalidi
  • Ahmad Dallal
  • Moderated by Omar Dewachi, AUB

 

Contact

Jadaliyya will be live tweeting the conference. Follow the Twitter hashtag #AICC2013 for live updates.

For more on the Asfari Institute, click here to visit the Asfari Institute Facebook page

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412