Call for Submissions: Palestine Yearbook of International Law

Call for Submissions: Palestine Yearbook of International Law

Call for Submissions: Palestine Yearbook of International Law

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Call for Submissions
Deadline for Abstracts: 15 February 2015

The Palestine Yearbook of International Law is now inviting submissions of scholarly articles for publication for its next volume, XVIII (2015). Unlike recent years, this upcoming volume will not be based on a specific theme. Therefore, the editors encourage the submission of scholarly pieces of relevance to public international law and Palestine. The Yearbook is edited at Birzeit University’s Institute of Law (Birzeit, Palestine), and published by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers (The Hague, The Netherlands). The Editor-in-Chief of the Yearbook is Mr. Ardi Imseis.

At this stage, the Institute of Law will be accepting abstracts for review. Abstracts should include a working title, with a preliminary outline of the author’s legal arguments, along with a CV.

Recommended topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Comparative legal analyses of human rights and freedom struggles of relevance to Palestine (e.g. East Timor, Northern Ireland, South Africa, United States, etc.);
  • Non-State actors, national liberation movements and international law;
  • Contemporary developments and gaps in the international humanitarian and human rights law framework;
  • The role and utility of continuing to use the United Nations (the General Assembly, Security Council, International Court of Justice, etc.) in advancing the cause of peace, justice and freedom in Palestine;
  • The statehood of Palestine and its implications in law and policy, both in the region and beyond;
  • The responsibility of States (including third States) international organizations, corporations and/or individuals in international law;
  • The continued relevance of the Oslo Accords under international law, and in light of Palestine’s accession to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties;
  • The Gaza Strip and international law;
  • Litigating the Palestine issue, at the domestic and international levels;
  • Apartheid and colonialism in international law;
  • Natural resources in international law;
  • Self-determination of peoples in international law;
  • Humanitarian intervention;
  • The Syria crisis in international law (international refugee law, international humanitarian law, etc…);
  • Palestine’s accessions to international treaties and the possibility of future accessions and the joining of international organizations.

Important dates and contact information:

Prospective authors should express interest by e-mailing the Assistant Editor of the Yearbook, Ms. Reem Al-Botmeh and sending an abstract of the suggested paper as indicated above, along with the prospective author’s CV.

The abstract of under 750 words should be submitted by 15 February 2015.

Notification of decisions will be provided 1 March 2015.

Contact Information:

For more information, please contact Ms. Reem Al-Botmeh, the Assistant Editor of the Yearbook, at rbotmeh@gmail.com or alternatively, you may communicate directly with Mr. Ardi Imseis at ai295@cam.ac.uk.


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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