Symposium: An Energy Revolution? Political Ecologies of Shale Oil in the Middle East, United States, and China (11-13 February, Washington DC)

Symposium: An Energy Revolution? Political Ecologies of Shale Oil in the Middle East, United States, and China (11-13 February, Washington DC)

Symposium: An Energy Revolution? Political Ecologies of Shale Oil in the Middle East, United States, and China (11-13 February, Washington DC)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Center for Contemporary Arab Studies
Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service
Abdullah S. Kamel International Symposium

An Energy Revolution? Political Ecologies of Shale Oil in the Middle East, United States, and China

11-13 February
Georgetown University
Washington DC

The CCAS has been holding annual symposia for nearly three decades, and this year’s meeting aims to assess the political, economic, human, and environmental impacts of shale oil and its technologies of extraction globally, and particularly on the societies and economies of the MENA region.

Delivering our keynote is Dr. Peter H. Gleick, co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland, California. His research and writing address the critical connections between water and human health, the hydrologic impacts of climate change, sustainable water use, privatization and globalization, and international conflicts over water resources.

Please RSVP

For additional information regarding the conference and a complete program, see below or visit our website


Day 1: February 11, 2015
Intercultural Center (ICC), Bunn Auditorium

6:00pm: Welcoming Remarks

  • Osama Abi-Mershed, Director
    Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University
     

6:15pm: Keynote Address: When Oil and Water Mix: The Future of the Water-Energy Nexus

  • Dr. Peter Gleick, President and Co-founder
    Pacific Institute

7:30pm: Reception (ICC Galleria, 3d Floor)


Day 2: February 12, 2015
Hariri Building, Lohrfink Auditorium

8:30-9:00am: Registration and Breakfast

9:00-9:15am: Welcome Address

  • James Reardon-Anderson, Dean
    School of Foreign Service

9:15-11:15am: Panel 1 -- Environmental & Socio-Eocnomic Challenges I

  • Jeremy Boak, Project Manager, Colorado School of Mines
  • Tim Beach, Professor, Georgetown University
  • Ziad Mimi, Professor, Birzeit University
  • Kate DeAngelis, Climate and Energy Campaigner, Friends of the Earth U.S.

11:30-1:00pm Panel 2 -- Environmental & Socio-Eocnomic Challenges II

  • Hussein Amery, Associate Director, Colorado School of Mines
  • Mark Giordano, Director, Georgetown University
  • Marwa Daoudy, Professor, Georgetown University

1:00-3:00pm: Lunch (Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, ICC141)

3:00-4:30pm: Panel 3 -- Human Ecology and Social Factors

  • Francesca de Châtel, Independent
  • Karen Rignall, Professor, University of Kentucky
  • Zahra Babar, Associate Director, Georgetown University - Qatar


Day 3: February 13, 2015
Hariri Building, Lohrfink Auditorium

9:00-9:30am: Registration and Breakfast

9:30-11:00am: Panel 4 -- Political Economy of Shale Oil

  • David Painter, Professor, Georgetown University
  • George Shambaugh, Associate Professor, Georgetown University
  • Mohamed Aly Ramady, Professor, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals 

11:15-12:45pm: Panel 5 -- Policy Implications I

  • Casimir Yost, Professor, Georgetown University
  • Thomas McNaugher, Professor, Georgetown University
  • Eckart Woertz, Senior Research Fellow, Barcelona Centre for International Affairs

12:45-2:45pm: Lunch (Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, ICC141)

3:00-4:30pm: Panel 6 -- Policy Implications II

  • Fawzi Aloulou, Energy Information Administration
  • Tareq Baconi, Research Scholar*, Columbia University 

4:30-5:00pm: Closing 

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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