LIVE EVENT: The 'State of Emergency' as the Rule and Not the Exception: Crisis Conditions and Exploitative Lawmaking During COVID-19 and Beyond (21 October 2020)

LIVE EVENT: The "State of Emergency" as the Rule and Not the Exception: Crisis Conditions and Exploitative Lawmaking During COVID-19 and Beyond (21 October 2020)

LIVE EVENT: The "State of Emergency" as the Rule and Not the Exception: Crisis Conditions and Exploitative Lawmaking During COVID-19 and Beyond (21 October 2020)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The "State of Emergency" as the Rule and Not the Exception:
Crisis Conditions and Exploitative Lawmaking During COVID-19 and Beyond


Wednesday 21 October 2020

1:30 PM New York / 6:30 PM London / 8:30 PM Beirut


Featuring Sinan Antoon, Carly A. Krakow, Vasuki Nesiah, and Gerry Simpson


Registration Now Open!

Click here to register through Zoom.  

 

Writing in the context of resistance to 20th century Fascism, in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" Walter Benjamin wrote, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” The pattern of authoritarian regimes exploiting crisis conditions to push forward unjust and marginalizing reforms has been repeated in the context of numerous crises and conflicts worldwide throughout recent history.

Currently, state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and police responses to the protests that have followed the police killing of George Floyd in the United States have sparked new concerns about governmental weaponization of authentic crisis conditions for nefarious purposes. By looking at key issues surrounding the declaration of official states of emergency, this event will cover how the exploitation of crisis can be understood as an essential ingredient in the production of laws and policies that repress vulnerable populations, violate international human rights, and fuel the power of authoritarian, totalitarian, and corrupt regimes, with dire implications on local and international scales.

Drawing on Benjamin’s conceptualization of the “state of emergency” to frame the conversation, historical and contemporary examples to be discussed by experts from multidisciplinary perspectives include the Trump administration’s exploitation of the COVID-19 pandemic to eliminate environmental and public health protections; the role of national emergency declarations in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War; and unauthorized arrests and violations of the rights of protesters worldwide amid the rise of international anti-racism protests in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Panelists


Sinan Antoon
(@SinanAntoon) is an Associate Professor at New York University's Gallatin School. He is an award-winning and widely-celebrated novelist, poet, scholar, and translator who was born and raised in Baghdad and left Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. He holds degrees from Baghdad University, Georgetown University, and Harvard University, where he obtained a doctorate in Arabic Literature. He has published two collections of poetry and four novels. His works have been translated into thirteen languages. He returned to his hometown in 2003 to co-direct the film About Baghdad, a documentary about Baghdad after dictatorship and under occupation. His translation of his own novel, The Corpse Washer, won the 2014 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Literary Translation. His op-eds have appeared in The GuardianThe New York TimesThe Nation, and various pan-Arab publications. His latest novel, The Book of Collateral Damage, was published by Yale University Press in 2019. 

Carly A. Krakow (@CarlyKrakow) is a PhD Candidate and Judge Rosalyn Higgins Scholar in the Department of Law at LSE. Her writing, research, and activism focus on international law, environmental justice, and human rights in contexts of statelessness and displacement. Her recent writing has appeared in publications including Al JazeeraJadaliyyaopenDemocracyTruthout, and the academic journal Water. At Jadaliyya, she is Special Projects Managing Editor and Co-Editor of the Environment Page. Carly earned her MPhil in International Relations and Politics from the University of Cambridge and her BA in Human Rights Law, Environmental Policy, and Comparative Literature from NYU. Her research in the Palestinian West Bank, South Africa, and Greece has focused on topics including the law and politics of water access, refugee rights, and justice for people affected by exposure to environmental toxins. 

Vasuki Nesiah (@VasukiNesiah) is Professor of Human Rights and International Law at the Gallatin School, NYU. She has published on the history and politics of human rights, humanitarianism, international criminal law, global feminisms, and decolonization. Her current project, Reading the Ruins: Slavery, Colonialism and International Law, focuses on international legal history, including reparations claims. Recent publications include the co-edited A Global History of Bandung and Critical Traditions in International Law (Cambridge 2017). Forthcoming publications include International Conflict Feminism (under contract with UPenn. Press). She is a founding member of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). 

Gerry Simpson was appointed to a Chair in Public International Law at LSE in 2016. He previously taught at the University of Melbourne (2007-2015), the Australian National University (1995-1998), and LSE (2000-2007), and has held visiting positions at ANU, Melbourne, NYU, and Harvard. He is the author of Great Powers and Outlaw States (Cambridge 2004), winner of the American Society of International Law Annual Prize for Creative Scholarship in 2005, and Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Polity 2007). He is co-editor (with Kevin Jon Heller) of Hidden Histories (Oxford 2014), (with Raimond Gaita) of Who’s Afraid of International Law? (Monash 2016), and (with Matt Craven and Sundhya Pahuja) of International Law and the Cold War (Cambridge 2019). He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Click here to register through Zoom. 


The Department of Law (@LSELaw) is one of the world's top law schools with an international reputation for the quality of its teaching and legal research. Our community is one of the largest in the School, and has played a major role in policy debates, policy-making and the education of lawyers and law teachers globally.

This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis.

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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