Symposium--Changing Ecologies of War and Humanitarianism: Reflecting on MSF’s 40 Years of Working in Conflict (Beirut, 4-5 May 2016)

Symposium--Changing Ecologies of War and Humanitarianism: Reflecting on MSF’s 40 Years of Working in Conflict (Beirut, 4-5 May 2016)

Symposium--Changing Ecologies of War and Humanitarianism: Reflecting on MSF’s 40 Years of Working in Conflict (Beirut, 4-5 May 2016)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Changing Ecologies of War and Humanitarianism: Reflecting on MSF’s 40 Years of Working in Conflict

Beirut, 4-5 May 2016

A Two-day conference organized by Médecins Sans Frontières, AUB’s Faculty of Health Sciences, and AUB’s Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs

MSF’s first project responding to conflict was inaugurated in Beirut in 1976. Since then, the organization has worked in major conflict zones across the world and has grown in size to navigate the medical, political and social realities of providing healthcare during war. While the demand for humanitarian aid grows, MSF’s ability to work in conflict zones faces compounding obstacles and challenges.

In recent decades, MSF has been at the forefront of responding to protracted conflicts and humanitarian crises in the Middle East and North Africa. Unfortunately, many of these projects have been forced to close down due to the changing political realities and conditions of war in certain locations. In 2013, MSF announced the closure of all its programs in Somalia because of increasing attacks on its staff. In 2014, the growing insecurity in post-Kaddafi Libya forced MSF to withdraw from the country. In Syria, following the kidnapping of five staff members in January 2014, the organisation suspended most of its activities in opposition held areas. At the same time, access has been systematically denied in government-controlled parts of the country.

In 2015, MSF faced the biggest loss of life in a single airstrike when the U.S. attacked and destroyed one of the most important and largest trauma hospitals in Afghanistan. Subsequent attacks on MSF-run and supported health facilities in Syria and Yemen have further highlighted the limits of international humanitarian law in preventing such attacks given the changing nature of war. While the challenges facing MSF pale in comparison to the reality of life in war for people trapped in brutal conflict, the ability of MSF to work, or lack thereof, is often an indicator of the broader processes entailed in the provision of assistance amid the disregard for civilian life and infrastructure in conflict zones around the world.

A two-day conference, to be held jointly between AUB and MSF, will critically examine some of the contemporary challenges to humanitarian action across different war geographies within and beyond the Middle East. The event will bring together researchers, academics, and practitioners working in and on the humanitarian sector to reflect on the changing conditions of warfare and humanitarian aid in light of the militarization of healthcare – its targeting and implication in war - massive population movements, and the rapid regionalization of health delivery in contemporary conflicts. This event is part of series of activities in Beirut marking 40-years of MSF working in conflict and the anniversary of 150 years since the AUB’s creation. The event is co-organised by MSF, the War and Global Health Working Group at the Faculty of Health Sciences and the Issam Fares Institute.

Outline of the Event

This event will provide a platform for academics and practitioners to reflect on the changing dynamics of contemporary war and challenges facing the provision of healthcare in conflict. The event will take place over 2 days and will include a series of panel discussions and keynote addresses. Participants will be invited to engage in an active and lively discussion on the key themes and draw on lessons learnt that shape the future of research on healthcare under conflict and the practice of humanitarian aid.

The panels are organized around four main themes:

  • The changing histories and landscapes of humanitarian aid
  • The targeting and implication of medicine in warfare
  • Responding to populations on the move
  • Emerging global health trends in contemporary conflict 


Click here for a complete list of panels, presentations, and discussions.

 

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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