Conference: The Egyptian Revolution One Year On (Oxford, 18-19 May 2012)

[Image from below conference announcement] [Image from below conference announcement]

Conference: The Egyptian Revolution One Year On (Oxford, 18-19 May 2012)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Conference: The Egyptian Revolution, One Year On
University of Oxford, 18-19 May 2012

You are warmly invited to register for the forthcoming international conference on The Egyptian Revolution, One Year On: Causes, Characteristics and Fortunes. The conference will be held on Friday 18 and Saturday 19 May 2012 at the Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University. It is co-sponsored by the DPIR and John Fell OUP Research Fund, University of Oxford, with the generous support of the Middle East Centre at St Antony`s College. It is convened by Reem Abou-El-Fadl of the DPIR and St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

Amidst the wave of scholarly interest this year in the Arab uprisings as a whole, this conference offers a critical and in-depth focus on one country case. Egypt is worthy of particular attention in its own right, but also as it has long been a touchstone for change in the Arab world. This conference will bring together scholars from inside and outside the Arab world, with the particular participation of colleagues based in Egypt. Moreover, we will be hosting a meeting of revolutionary activists, to help answer important questions about the nature of revolutionary political work, and to devote a space to their voices, too often sidelined in certain fora of political and scholarly debate. We hope this conference will form the basis for a new scholarly network whose strength lies in its ties with its activist counterparts, and which will engage in continued collaboration on emerging themes. Together, we hope to work towards the longer term project of writing ‘anniversary histories’ of Egypt’s January Revolution.

The conference proceedings will be video-recorded and placed online in due course. Further details and the link for registration can also be found at the conference website: oxfordegyptconference.wordpress.com.  

Programme

Friday 18 May 2012

9.00 Registration

10.00-10.15 | Welcome and Introductory Remarks

  • Stephen Whitefield, Head of Department (University of Oxford)
  • Reem Abou-El-Fadl, Conference Convener (University of Oxford)

10.15-11.45 | Panel 1 | Preludes and Explanations

  • Chair: Louise Fawcett (University of Oxford)
  • Marie Duboc (American University in Cairo): The Egyptian Labour Movement and the Politics of Visibility
  • Amr Osman (Gulf University of Science and Technology): What Did Mubarak Actually Do: The Causes of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution According to Egyptian Intellectuals
  • Adam Hanieh (School of Oriental and African Studies): Re-scaling Egypt’s Political Economy: Neoliberalism and the Transformation of the Regional Space

11.45-12.00 | Coffee

12.00-13.30 | Panel 2 | Movements and Mobilisation

  • Chair: Charles Tripp (School of Oriental and African Studies)
  • John Chalcraft (London School of Economics): Horizontalism on the Nile: what does it mean to say that the Egyptian uprising of 2011 was leaderless/or leaderful? And does it matter?
  • Mustapha Kamel al-Sayyid (Cairo University): Managing the Transition in the Arab Spring: A Comparative Perspective
  • Robbert Woltering (University of Amsterdam): Unusual suspects: “Ultra’s” as Political Actors in the Revolution

13.30-14.45 | Lunch: Common Room, DPIR

14.45 – 16.15 | Panel 3 | The Language of Revolution

  • Chair: Reem Abou-El-Fadl (University of Oxford)
  • Hebatallah Salem (American University in Cairo): Narrating the Egyptian Revolution through Jokes: Is it Still a Laughing Revolution?
  • Tahia Abdel Nasser (American University in Cairo): Poetry as Archive: Egypt’s Revolution and Archival Poetics
  • Randa Kaldas (American University in Cairo): University on the Square Documentation Project: A Glimpse into the Economic and Business History Research Center’s Contribution

16.15-16.30 | Coffee

16.30-18.00 | ‘The Revolution Continues’: A Conversation

  •  Zyad El-Elaimy MP (Revolutionary Youth Coalition and Egyptian Parliament)
  • Heba Raouf Ezzat (University of Cairo and Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies)
  • Marwa Sharafeldin (University of Oxford and Musawah)
  • Mezna Qato (University of Oxford and US Palestine Community Network)

 
Saturday 19 May 2012

10.00 – 12.00 | Panel 4 | Old State, New Rules

  • Chair: Mustapha Kamel al-Sayyid (Cairo University)
  • Paul Amar (University of California, Santa Barbara): From State Security Enforcers to Violence Entrepreneurs in Egypt’s Emerging Democracy
  • Amr Shalakany (American University in Cairo): Law and Revolution Revisited
  • Alex Kazamias (University of Coventry): Towards Praetorian Parliamentarism: The Deforming Effects of the January Revolution on the Egyptian state
  • Nicola Pratt (University of Warwick): From War of Manoeuvre to War of Position

12.00-12.15 | Coffee

12.15 – 13.45 | Panel 5 | Competing Visions of Tahrir

  • Chair: Tarik Sabry (University of Westminster)
  • Aya Nassar (Cairo University): Contesting Visions and Public Spaces in Cairo
  • Mark Peterson (Miami University): In Search of Antistructure: The Meaning of Tahrir Square in Egypt’s Ongoing Social Drama
  • Walter Armbrust (University of Oxford): Trickster: Taufiq ‘Ukasha, the Perpetuation of Liminal Crisis, and the Shaping of Counter-revolutionary Discourse

13.45 – 14.45 | Lunch, DPIR Common Room

14.45 – 16.45 | Panel 6 | Beyond Egypt

  • Chair: Corinna Mullin (School of Oriental and African Studies)
  • Fred Lawson (Mills College): Revolutionary Egypt’s Relations with Surrounding States: Internal Transformation, External Realignment and Regional Security
  • Andrea Teti (University of Aberdeen): Contesting Democracy: Discursive Patterns Before and After the Egyptian Uprising
  • Kerem Öktem (University of Oxford): Fear of Tahrir: US-Turkish Projects for a New Middle East
  • Miriyam Aouragh (University of Oxford): Facebook Revolution? Social Media as Orientalist Mediation

 16.45 – 17.00 | Concluding Remarks: Towards a research agenda: ‘Anniversary Histories’

 17.00 – 17.15 | Coffee

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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