Call for Papers -- Palestine under Occupation: The Legitimation of Violence and the Violence of Legitimation (Queen Mary, 26 May 2017)

Call for Papers -- Palestine under Occupation: The Legitimation of Violence and the Violence of Legitimation (Queen Mary, 26 May 2017)

Call for Papers -- Palestine under Occupation: The Legitimation of Violence and the Violence of Legitimation (Queen Mary, 26 May 2017)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Call for Paper Proposals

Palestine under Occupation:
The Legitimation of Violence & the Violence of Legitimation

Date and Venue: 26 May 2017, Queen Mary, University of London.

We invite proposals for papers to be presented at this one-day research workshop hosted by the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. The workshop will consist of a series of panels during the day followed by a public lecture.

Confirmed Keynote Speaker:
Noura Erakat (Assistant Professor, George Mason University: http://www.nouraerakat.com/).

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to James Eastwood (james.eastwood@qmul.ac.uk) and Catherine Charrett (c.charrett@qmul.ac.uk).

Funds are available for modest travel bursaries for research students and early career academics. Please enquire with the organisers for more details.

Deadline for Proposals:
24 February 2017

This workshop considers the connection between violence and legitimation in the maintenance of the occupation of Palestine. The Israeli colonisation of Palestine demands an interrogation of the techniques, strategies, and discourses through which this violent state of affairs is legitimated, especially as it takes on more extreme forms such as the recent wars in Gaza. This workshop seeks firstly to bring together existing scholarship which has examined the legitimation of Israeli state violence through practices such as law, human rights, ethics, visual representations, narrative, memory, and history. However, it also seeks to examine these issues alongside other questions surrounding the legitimation and de-legitimation of Palestinian actors, agendas, and political strategies, particularly in the wake of recent high profile attempts to restrict international solidarity activism. The conference asks whether and how these contemporary struggles over legitimacy and violence are related, and what their interrogation might reveal about each other.

The workshop’s departure point is a critical analysis of the order surrounding the legitimation of violence, asking how global ethics, international law, racial hierarchies, gender domination, economic exchange and state-making practices have shaped the permissible use of violence, as well as the possible strategies for resisting this violence. For example, has the statelessness of Palestinian resistance meant a lack of access not only to technological ‘advanced’ forms of warfare, but also the inability to claim the legitimate authority of state-wielded violence?  Have orders of acceptable violence led to the reproduction of Israeli state violence? And has the circulation of Israel’s strategies of legitimation abroad also served to strengthen the legitimisation of its use of violence in Palestine?

The workshop also seeks to raise more fundamental questions about the political and analytic categories of legitimation and violence themselves. These questions prompt us to consider not only how practices of legitimation directly facilitate violence, but also how this very interaction modifies existing understandings of legitimacy and illegitimacy, violence and non-violence. At what point do legitimation and de-legitimation, insofar as they structure the field of domination of some actors over others, not only depend on violence but also become violent practices in and of themselves? These concerns echo some of those articulated in Walter Benjamin`s critique of violence and Foucault`s historico-political analysis of war. But they also push the categories of these inquiries further through consideration of the relationship of legitimacy and violence in a colonial setting in which statehood remains a highly contested political field.

Proposals may wish to address one or more of the questions below:

  1. Through what strategies has Israel sought to legitimate the violence of its occupation of Palestine, and how have these been resisted?
  2. What forms has the struggle for political legitimacy in Palestine taken, and what has been the corresponding role of attempts at de-legitimisation?
  3. How are struggles over legitimacy and violence in Palestine related, and how does this affect our understanding of the meaning and instantiation of these concepts?
  4. How have different state-making technologies, apparatuses, norms and institutions ordered permissible forms of violence both historically and contemporarily in Israel and Palestine?
  5. What tools, both conceptual and strategic, are needed to reorder the legitimation of violence which structure the continued occupation of Palestine? 

In framing proposals, we encourage contributors to approach the occupation of Palestine in its full historical and geographical dimensions, ranging if necessary beyond the experience of the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 1967 and/or the post-1948 period. 

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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