Call for Applicants: Summer Arabic & Politics Exchange (14 June - 12 July, Tunis)

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Feb 19, 2013 Tunisia
[Image from mideastwire.com] [Image from mideastwire.com]

Call for Applicants: Summer Arabic & Politics Exchange (14 June - 12 July, Tunis)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Mideastwire.com and its partners - Université Paris-Dauphine I Tunis, Tunisia Live and the Bosphore Academy - are pleased to announce the first Summer Arabic & Politics Exchange June 14-July 12, 2013, in Tunis, Tunisia.

The four-week course will immerse our participants in the language and politics of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), with a particular emphasis on direct engagement with some of the leading academic, political, intellectual and religious figures active across the spectrum in Tunisia.

This summer`s Exchange will also be opened by a two-day conference, June 15-16, led by more than a dozen MENA experts from the International Crisis Group (ICG - www.crisisgroup.org). The consecutive weekend sessions will cover a broad range of topics addressed by ICG`s country analysts and moderated by their senior staff.

Different participation modules (detailed below) are available: Including morning Arabic classes only, afternoon and weekend Politics seminars only, attendance at the opening ICG conference, and two-weeks of Politics seminars instead of the full month. TO REQUEST AN APPLICATION for this Summer`s Exchange, email info@mideastwire.com.

APPLY BY APRIL 20, 2013 (applicants are accepted on a rolling basis and spaces are limited).

Note that tuition discounts are available for those applicants with demonstrated need as well as alumni of our previous Exchanges. For more information, please email info@mideastwire.com 

Background on Five Years of the Exchange in the MENA Region:

The Exchange is an effort by Mideastwire.com and its partners to promote direct engagement and understanding through a variety of city-focused conferences.

The First Exchange was launched in June 2008 in Beirut, Lebanon. Now, several years on, over 270 students from 44 different countries have participated in 16 different Exchange programs across the region, with many going on to work as diplomats in their home countries, for NGOs serving the region and as social entrepreneurs.

The Exchange welcomes applications from current students as well as professionals and post-professionals interested in better understanding the Middle East and North Africa, and, we hope, their own country`s involvement in the region.

To view previous Exchange programs in Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Tunis and the Gulf, as well as media coverage of our efforts, visit http://www.thebeirutexchange.com 

Program Details & Costs:

This Summer`s Exchange will be offered in the following modules:

OPTION A: Politics Only-Full Course, June 14-July 12

  • Participants will engage in over 140 hours of seminars, meetings and field trips offered in the afternoons (1:30pm-6:30pm) and weekends throughout the four week course June 14-July 12;
  • The language of the Politics Course is English, with translation from French and Arabic provided for all students;
  • For previous Tunis Exchange programs detailing the scope of our activities, the range of speakers and where we travel in the country, visit www.thebeirutexchange.com;
  • FEE OPTION A - $2300.

OPTION B: Politics Only-Half Course, June 14-June 28 or June 28-July 12

  • Participants will have the option of joining us during our Politics Course in the afternoons (1:30pm-6:30pm) and weekends either June 14-June 28 or June 28-July 12 (approximately 70 hours of sessions);
  • As with all of our Exchanges, the precise program will only be released in hard copy at the beginning of the course, although we expect to announce speakers and field trips scheduled for each Half Course by April 2013 and expect there to be a rough balance in the caliber of speakers between both Courses;
  • Participants in the first Half Course June 14-June 28 will be afforded full access to the opening conference June 15 and 16 convened by the International Crisis Group;
  • FEE OPTION B - $1400.

OPTION C: Arabic Only-Full Course, June 14-July 12

  • Participants will engage in 60 hours of Arabic classes offered at several different levels including both colloquial Tunisian and Formal Arabic, 9am-12pm, every Monday to Friday;
  • The courses will be coordinated and taught by the Bosphore Academy (www.bosphoreacemie.com) at their facility in downtown Tunis, within walking distance of our hotel facility, nearby participant accommodations as well as all afternoon sessions;
  • For more specific information on the Arabic classes offered during the Exchange, please email info@mideastwire.com;
  • FEE OPTION C: $900.

OPTION D: Politics & Arabic-Full Course, June 14-July 12

  • Participants will engage in both Option A and Option C, joining our morning Arabic classes as well as the afternoon and weekend Politics sessions and the opening ICG conference;
  • FEE OPTION D: $3200.

OPTION E: ICG Conference, June 14-16

  • During the opening weekend of this summer`s Exchange, participants will engage in more than 18 hours of consecutive sessions led by more than a dozen International Crisis Group experts and senior staff, covering the topics that ICG regularly analyses in MENA through its policy reports, commentary and alerts;
  • ICG country experts will be led by Robert Malley, ICG`s director of MENA programs;
  • FEE OPTION E: $350 regular admission/Exchange Alumni $250. (accommodation and meals not included)

Logistics & Other Costs

Location - All Arabic sessions during the month will take place in downtown Tunis at the Bosphore Academy classrooms (www.bosphoreacemie.com) on Avenue Mohammad V. All Politics sessions will take place in the main conference room of the Tunis Dauphine Institute (http://www.tunisdauphine.tn/) located within 15-20 minutes walking distance of the Bosphore Academy, as well as our preferred accommodations, including our own hotel facility.

Accommodations - Participants have the option of securing their own accommodations during the program. Accommodation at either our Bed and Breakfast (The Maison Tunis) located next to the Bosphore Academy or across the street at the three star El-Pacha hotel (http://www.lepacha.com.tn/) will cost approximately $950-$1200 for the month in a shared double room, including breakfast and all taxes.

Air Travel - It is highly recommended that all participants reserve their airline tickets as early as possible since the summer season is a difficult time to secure seats. Roundtrip tickets from Western Europe are typically $400 during the summer and approximately $900 from the United States.

Miscellaneous - Tunisia is a relatively affordable country when it comes to food and transportation. Participants should budget a minimum of $15 per day for lunch and dinner, as well as a minimum of $300 for other leisure costs during the month.

Financial Aid - In order to gather a diverse group of participants, we offer financial aid to applicants with demonstrated need amounting to between 25% and 50% of the tuition cost. Unfortunately, we cannot offer financial aid towards accommodation costs, airfare or other boarding and leisure costs.

Previous Institutional Participants in the Tunis Exchange:

En-Nahda Party
Congress for the Republic Party
Ettakatol Party
Constitutional Democratic Rally Party
The Democratic Modernist Pole Party
Worker`s Communist Party
Progressive Democratic Party
Tunisian General Trade Union
Union of Tunisian Journalists
The Central Bank of Tunisia
Ministry of Women`s Affairs
Ministry of Human Rights
Manouba University
Tunis University
Association of Democratic Women
Tunisian Network for Social Economy
Tunisian Observatory for a Democratic Transition
Tunisian League of Human Rights
Tunisian-American Chamber of Commerce
Tunisian Association of Young Entrepreneurs
Committee to Protect Journalists
Attounsia Newspaper

For more information: 

  • Click here to view a schedule for previous Tunis Exchanges.
  • To request an application, contact info@mideastwire.com. 
  • Application deadline is 20 April 2013 (note that applicants are accepted on a rolling basis and spaces are limited).

 
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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