Call for Applicants: Funded PhD in Eastern Mediterranean Oil & Gas Geopolitics (Sciences Po Paris, Deadline: 20 April 2018)

Credit: https://medsalt.eu/the-project/ Credit: https://medsalt.eu/the-project/

Call for Applicants: Funded PhD in Eastern Mediterranean Oil & Gas Geopolitics (Sciences Po Paris, Deadline: 20 April 2018)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

What: A three year PhD position is open as part of the Saltgiant project

Topic: Eastern Mediterranean oil and gas discoveries, regional geopolitics and economic development issues

Where: Sciences Po Paris

Deadline: 20th of April 2018

Objectives

The PhD will examine the impact of recent discoveries of natural gas under salt deposits on the geopolitics and the economic development of the whole region. It will do so by mobilizing a geographical approach, with a relational understanding of matters, capital, people and ideas that will enrich the more classical accounts of international relations and development studies. The project asks whether the cooperative/competitive strategies designed to exploit the new resources can challenge the existing political and economic order at three levels: the internal country level, the regional one, and between the region and the neighboring countries:

  1. at the internal level, the struggle over the control of the new energy flows will go along with new hopes and political schemes to turn the new income into collective (or individual) wealth and national pride.
  2. at the regional level (East Mediterranean), neighboring states, currently in a state of competition if not war, are struggling for accessing to gas resources, including delimiting exclusive economic zone, attracting investments for drilling, as well as pumping and exporting. This process can trigger new conflicts but also push former foes to cooperate, for instance in building common exports routes;
  3. the discoveries may modify the geopolitical relations with distant states and regions, for instance decrease the dependence of Arab Levant states vis-à-vis the Gulf monarchies, hence modifying the political primacy Gulf states gained in recent years.

The research will carry in-depth fieldwork survey in at least one of the countries of the region (including Egypt). The goal is to connect the institutional (technological, scientific, political and economic) framework built to exploit the new resources and the broader national and regional issues regarding economic development and national unity, with an emphasis on the geographical dimension (relations between the Mediterranean shore region and the whole country).

The candidate must hold a masters’ degree in social sciences, preferably geography but also international relations, political sciences, sociology or economics. A minimal command of French is requested (B1 level) in order to interact with the project’s partners. At least a basic knowledge of Arabic will be a strength.

The candidate will strongly engage in the interdisciplinary training activities of the Saltgiant network (see website).

Supervisor : Eric Verdeil, Professor of Geography and Urban Studies, CERI-Sciences Po

Expected Results

A monography based on the analysis of the geographic, economic and political processes involved in the exploitation process, taking into consideration the Egyptian case, possibly with comparative insights from another Mediterranean case studies.

Planned Secondments - SALTGIANT Partners ; Duration 1-6 month(s) each

(1) CEDEJ : Centre d’études et de documentation juridiques et économiques, Le Caire. This Cairo based research center, headed by Geographer Karine Bennafla, is part of the network of Humanities and Social Sciences French Institutes Abroad, under the joint tutelage of the French Minister of Foreign Affairs and the National Center for Scientific Research.

(2) University of Durham (UK)/Dept of Geography/International Borders Research Unit: Prof. Gavin Bridge is currently leading a research endeavor oriented toward the new geopolitics of offshore in the Eastern Mediterranean (which is currently in the process of submission to various European funding). The PhD candidate will greatly benefit from the theoretical and comparative insights developed in this unit.

(3) IPEMED : Institut de prospective économique du Monde méditerranéen. The Institut is based in Paris. The PhD candidate will spend two months at the Institute and will be involved in their activities, and beneficit from their knowledge of the business networks in this region
(M. J.-L. Guigou, director; P. Bekouche, scientific advisor).

Application

Send application via www.ipgp.fr/saltgiant by 20/04/2018 as well as through Sciences Po Doctoral School. Be in touch with the supervisor before submitting the application because of administrative complexity : Eric Verdeil : eric.verdeil_at_sciencespo.fr

Benefit and Salary

In accordance with the MSCA regulations for early stage researchers, the successful candidates will benefit from highly competitive working conditions and salary. Exact salary will be confirmed upon appointment.

In addition to their individual scientific projects, all fellows will benefit from further continuing education, which includes internships and secondments, a variety of training modules as well as transferable skills courses and active participation in field courses, workshops and conferences.

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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