Call for Papers: Edited Volume on 'North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions, and Culture'

Call for Papers: Edited Volume on 'North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions, and Culture'

Call for Papers: Edited Volume on 'North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions, and Culture'

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Call for papers, edited volume:

“North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions, and Culture”

We are seeking papers for an edited volume entitled “North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions, and Culture,” which is currently under contract with Bloomsbury Academic Publishing.

Overview: 

The relationship between Europe and North Africa has often been described through the lens of conflict and violence. Yet the experience of empire and the institutional and cultural formations it introduced also provide multiple examples of interdependence and cooperation. This edited volume seeks to understand how this complicated relationship has influenced European institutions and conceptions of identity since World War II.  This group of essays will therefore study North Africa not as a distant and foreign territory, but as a region that was integral to shaping modern Europe.

This interdisciplinary volume will put historical analysis and contemporary politics into conversation and provide a decentered approach to the current challenges faced by the EU and its member-states such as competing understandings of democracy, rising xenophobia, and persistent regional inequalities.

The proposed volume is based on a series of three workshops that were held at the European University Institute in Florence over the 2015-2016 academic year.

We welcome submissions that speak to the following chronological themes:  

  • Colonialism and the Shaping of Europe. During colonialism, universal discourses of equality often clashed with the violence and particularisms inherent in colonial rule. We thus seek submissions that explore how colonial North Africa was decisive for European conceptions and practices of claim-making, racial difference, and citizenship.
  • Cooperation, Dependence and Interdependence. A new set of relationships between North Africa and Europe were fashioned in the post-colonial period, signaling notable ruptures and continuities. We invite submissions that investigate these logics, for example by analyzing the increasing politicization of immigration, or by studying how North African development strategies influenced European institutions. We are especially keen to include papers that address immigration to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s.
  • After the Arab Spring: Europe and North Africa in Crisis. The past decade has raised pressing questions regarding the definition of Europe as a cultural, political and geographical unit. While the European Union (EU) presents itself as an “area of freedom, security and justice,” the vision from the periphery is far less sanguine. We therefore seek papers that study the aftermath of the so-called “Arab Springs,” the increased securitization of the region, or the ongoing refugee crisis - all of which have prompted new investigations of the Mediterranean space. Grassroots perspectives or those interested in states of exception are especially welcome.

Submission Information & Guidelines:

  • Submissions should include a 300-500 word abstract and a brief CV with full contact information. They should be sent to muhdavis@ucsc.edu or Thomas.Serres@eui.eu before 1 September 2016.  Authors selected for the volume will be notified by 7 September 2016.
  • If selected, a completed article of 8,000 words will be requested by 1 December 2016.
  • After a peer review, all finalized articles will be submitted to Bloomsbury Publishing by 1 March 2017.

  

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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