Call for Papers: The Impact of Arab Uprisings on Citizenship in the Arab World (12-14 November, Lebanon)

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May 16, 2014
Call for Papers: The Impact of Arab Uprisings on Citizenship in the Arab World (12-14 November, Lebanon)

Call for Papers: The Impact of Arab Uprisings on Citizenship in the Arab World (12-14 November, Lebanon)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Balamand is currently accepting abstract submissions for this conference that will be held at the University of Balamand at the Koura region in North Lebanon on 12-14 November 2014.

Abstract Deadline: 7 June 2014

This conference aims at bringing together scholars from various regions and disciplines to address the impact of Arab Uprisings on the advancement of citizenship`s ideas and practices throughout the Arab World. Papers in Arabic, English, and French will be accepted.

 

Conference Synopsis

The Arab uprisings that occurred in a number of Arab states and have had ripple effects on others since late 2010 are part of a process of change that had been brewing in the Arab World for some time. Participants in the uprisings demanded dignity, work, bread, liberty, and social justice, linking together calls for political, social, and economic change and for wider citizen participation in political life.

The uprisings overthrew long held assumptions of the people’s apathy and/or the inability to resist oppressors and initiate change. Along with this, the established systems of values promoted by political systems were challenged and shaken. These political systems had emphasized obligations much more than rights in the relationship between citizens and the state. They had also addressed people more as subjects than as citizens and valued them in terms of their unquestionable loyalty rather than their contractual membership with the state.

The challenge to political authorities during the uprisings was coupled with a renewed debate over citizenship rights. During the uprisings, the practice of citizenship by various participants who adopted a rights-based approach, added significantly to the prominence of the issue of citizenship. As a result, demands for wider political participation, constitutional amendments, job creation, poverty eradication, and the elimination of discrimination played an important role in the attempt to base citizenship on the principles of equality and justice. One major and potential achievement of some of the uprisings could well be a changing relationship of the people with their political systems through the initiation of reforms within those systems.

The ongoing uprisings have highlighted the multi-dimensional aspects of citizenship hence bringing to the forefront issues requiring further exploration. For instance, will the promotion of citizenship (and what kind of citizenship) constitute the base and/or path for the changing relationship between people and the state? Under what conditions will citizenship grow and become more significant, or recede, in tandem with the changes enacted by the uprisings? How will the issues of inclusion and exclusion of the various groups be addressed if the foundations of citizenship are gradually adopted, and on what basis? To what extent, and how, would the rights of women, refugees, and migrant workers, among others, be addressed in constructing citizenship, rethinking nationality rights, and guaranteeing residents’ rights? Will citizenship fit with a probable re-emphasis on nationalism and/or will it emerge along potential new forms of imagined communities? The conference plans to analyze these and other such questions.

The conference aims to explore critically the impact of the uprisings on the debates and possible advancement and future direction of citizenship in the Arab World. Papers to be presented in the conference will address whether, and how, the Arab uprisings have produced changes in the perception, conceptualization, an d implementation of citizenship in the Arab World and explore the possibilities of the latter’s continuity/discontinuity. Papers with interdisciplinary perspectives are encouraged.

Possible Topics

We invite scholars to contribute work that fits with the conference theme. Some of the possible topics that will be addressed in the conference include but are not limited to:

  • What constitutes citizenship in calls and acts of change during the uprisings?
  • Conceptualizations and approaches to citizenship in the Arab World addressed before and during the uprisings
  • Constitutions, Laws, and calls for change
  • Impact of neo-liberalism on uprisings and/or citizenship
  • Nationalism, uprisings, and citizenship
  • Religion, uprisings, and citizenship
  • Identity politics of groups, including religious, ethnic, and linguistic groups
  • Citizenship and rights of refugees and migrant workers
  • Civil society groups and their various roles
  • Presentations of citizenship and/or the uprisings in arts and literature
  • Pre-uprising policies of inclusion/exclusion and the suggested modifications
  • Media: its roles and impact on addressing citizenship issues, including the uprisings period, and exploring any possible links between the three of them
  • Education, citizenship, and uprisings: exploring possible links and impact
  • Role of political parties, unions, and social movements in promoting or hindering citizenship, particularly during the uprisings
  • Gender inequality and the ways it was addressed historically in citizenship approaches, and how it is treated through the uprisings
  • Role of civic engagement and community service in promoting citizenship
  • The place of citizenship in the debate on the establishment of a civil or a religious state before and during the uprisings
  • Effects of the Arab uprisings on other Arab States, including the possible expansion of citizenship both in activism and implementation.

The Conference will be held at the University of Balamand in al-Kurah region, North Lebanon, between November 12 and 14, 2014. Academics and researchers interested in contributing to the conference are kindly requested to upload their abstracts (of no more than 350 words) to our website, along with a short bibliography, under “Abstract Submission Form” athttp://home.balamand.edu.lb/english/callforpapers/AbstractSubmissionForm.asp.

The deadline for submitting this material is June 7, 2014.

More information (including registration, fees, and accommodation) will be available in due course on the conference web link.

For further inquiry please contact Dr. Sami Ofeish at:
citizenship.uprisings@balamand.edu.lb
00961-6930250 ext. 2388.

Important Deadlines

  • Submission of Abstracts: June 7, 2014
  • Notification of Abstract Acceptance: June 30, 2014
  • Submission of Paper: September 15, 2014

 

The University of Balamand Press will publish a comprehensive volume of theme-based papers from the conference.
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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

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