Reflections on Mass Protests & Uprisings in the Arab World (Part 1 and 2 Videos)

Reflections on Mass Protests & Uprisings in the Arab World (Part 1 and 2 Videos)

Reflections on Mass Protests & Uprisings in the Arab World (Part 1 and 2 Videos)

By : Arab Studies Institute

These two panels are part of a series by the collective project "Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World." This is the first in a year-long series of events and knowledge production by the collective. Each of the panels addresses reflections by the speakers on the politics and knowledge production related to the uprisings during the past ten years. This first event is intended to herald the yearlong conversation/activities.

Look out for an event in February on teaching the Arab Uprisings and an event in March on archives and the Arab Uprisings. 

More at www.TheArabUprisings.org

View Part 1 Here


You can also watch via Youtube 

Part 1 Speakers


Amaney Jamal
Professor of Politics and principal investigator for the Arab Barometer Project at Princeton University.

Asli Bali
Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and Faculty Director of the UCLA Law Promise Institute for Human Rights.

Rochelle Davis
Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University.

Ahmad Dallal
Dean of Georgetown University in Qatar.

Ziad Abu-Rish
Co-Director of the MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts, and Visiting Associate Professor of Human Rights, at Bard College. 

Lina Abou Habib
Senior Gender Advisor at the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at the American University of Beirut.

Adam Hanieh
Professor in Development Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic studies at Exeter University. 

Rashid Khalidi
Professor of Modern Arab Studies and director of the Middle East Institute of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.

Moderated by Bassam Haddad
 

View Part 2 Here


You can also watch via Youtube

Part 2 Speakers


Bassam Haddad
Associate Professor at the Schar School for Policy and Government at George Mason University.

Sherene Seikaly
Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Rabab Al-Mahdi
Assistant Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo.

Muriam Haleh-Davis
Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

Amr Adly
Assistant Professor in the department of political science at The American University in Cairo.

Nadje Al-Ali
Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University.

Lisa Wedeen
Professor of Political Science and the Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. 

Mohammed Bamyeh
Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at University of Pittsburgh.

Moderated by Amaney Jamal
 
 

The "Ten Years On" collective includes: Arab Studies Institute, Princeton’s Arab Barometer, GMU’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Project, Georgetown University (Center for Contemporary Arab Studies), the Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS), American University of Beirut’s Asfari Institute, Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies, UC Santa Barbara’sCenter for Middle East Studies, Harvard University’s Center for Middle East Studies, University of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, Birzeit University’s Department of Political Science, Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law, AUC Affiliates, Georgetown University (Qatar), The Global Academy (MESA Affiliated), and Institute of Palestine Studies.

••• 

Ten Years On
Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World


December 17, 2020 marked the tenth anniversary of the start of the Arab uprisings in Tunisia. Beginning in 2011, mass uprisings swept North Africa and the Middle East, spreading from the shores of Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and the Eastern Province of the Arabian Peninsula. A “second wave” of mass protests and uprisings manifested during 2019 in Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon, and Iraq. The persistence of demands for popular sovereignty even in the face of re-entrenched authoritarianism, imperial intervention, and civil strife is a critical chapter in regional and global history.
 
In an effort to mark, interrogate, and reflect on the Arab uprisings, we launch a yearlong set of events, reflections, and conversations. We hope to produce resources for educators, researchers, students, and journalists to understand the last decade of political upheaval historically and in the lived present.
 
Over the past decade, a plethora of events, texts, and artistic and cultural productions have navigated the last decade’s spectrum of affective and material registers. We hope to contribute to these efforts through a historically grounded, theoretically rigorous approach that collaboratively interrogates the multiple questions the Arab uprisings continue to pose.
 

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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