LIVE EVENT - Ten Years On Project: Exploring the New Regional Dynamics of the Middle East (26 May)

LIVE EVENT - Ten Years On Project: Exploring the New Regional Dynamics of the Middle East (26 May)

LIVE EVENT - Ten Years On Project: Exploring the New Regional Dynamics of the Middle East (26 May)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Ten Years On Project Presents

Exploring the New Regional Dynamics of the Middle East


Wednesday 26 May 2021
1:00 PM Washington D.C. | 6:00 PM London | 8:00 PM Beirut


Click here to register for the event via Zoom
Watch live on Facebook.com/JADALIYYA or Facebook.com/TheACSS 


This is the fifth signature event of the
Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World Project

For more information, go to thearabuprisings.com

Co-sponsored by  the Arab Council for Social Sciences and the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter

Featuring:

Seda Altug (Bogazici University)
Olfa Lamloum (Tunisia Country Director, International Alert)
Maziyar Ghiabi (University of Exeter)
Arang Keshavarzian (New York University)
Rima Majed (American University of Beirut)
Rafeef Ziadah (SOAS, University of London)

Moderators: Seteney Shami (ACSS) and Adam Hanieh (University of Exeter)



The last decade has witnessed deep changes to the regional dynamics of the Middle East. Millions of people have been displaced within and across the region, disrupting existing territorial arrangements and producing a range of new cross-border networks and political and economic ties. Struggles over regional influence have generated complex patterns of inter-state rivalries and reconfigured regional alliances in unprecedented ways. Closely coupled to these unstable political dynamics are changing trade, finance, and investment flows, with new relationships evolving between Middle Eastern states and neighbouring regions such East and West Africa, South Asia, and the Balkans.

This signature event will explore some of these themes and their implications for how we understand the Middle East as a ‘region’ or ‘area’. What new cross-border flows have emerged in the Middle East over the last decade, and how do these challenge standard social science approaches to the Middle East? How can we integrate the pluralities of the Middle East – including those of non-Arab majority states – into a study of the region, in ways that move beyond the constraints of competing nationalisms, geographical silos, and disciplinary boundaries? How do we recognize regional patterns of unevenness, marginalization, and dispossession, while avoiding homogenizing accounts that flatten the Middle East as an area in uniform ‘decline’ or ‘crisis’? How is the Middle East located within the changing global order, and what new relationships might be forming between the region and other areas of the world system? 

Speakers 


Seda Altuğ
 is a lecturer at the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She received her PhD from Utrecht University, Netherlands. Her dissertation is entitled “Sectarianism in the Syrian Jazira: Community, Land and Violence in the Memories of World War I and the French Mandate (1915–1939)”. Her research interests are state-society relations in French-Syria, sectarianism, land question, empire, border and memory. Her recent work concerns land, property regimes and citizenship practices in the late Ottoman East and Syria under the French mandate.


Dr Olfa Lamloum
 holds a PhD in political science from Paris 8 University. She taught at the University of Paris-Nanterre before joining the French Institute of the Middle East (IFPO) in Beirut as a researcher.  She is currently the Tunisia country director for the NGO International Alert. She has led several research projects on the relegation of the border areas and working class suburbs in Tunisia. Her latest edited book is Jeunes et violences institutionnelles : Enquêtes dix ans après la révolution(2021) She also co-directed 2 documentary films, including Voices from Kasserine (2017).


Maziyar Ghiabi
 is Wellcome Lecturer in Medical Humanities and Politics at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Drugs Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran (London: Cambridge University Press, 2019, also in Open Access) won the 2020 Book of the Year Nikki Keddie Award by the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA). Maziyar's current project is about the experience of 'addiction' in states of disruption and it is funded by the Wellcome Trust, 2021-2026. Beside the politics of health, Maziyar has worked on theoretical and anthropological approaches to revolt, displacement and state formation, the outcome of which will appear in a forthcoming book, States Without People in 2022 with McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022.


Arang Keshavarzian
 is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University.  He is the author of Bazaar and State in Iran: The Politics of the Tehran Marketplace  and the co-editor with Ali Mirsepassi of Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution.  He has published articles on the political economy and history of Iran, the Persian Gulf, and the broader Middle East in journals including Politics and Society, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Geopolitics, Economy and Society, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Rima Majed is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies Department at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Her work focuses on the fields of social inequality, social movements, sectarianism, conflict, and violence. Dr. Majed has completed her PhD at the University of Oxford where she conducted her research on the relationship between structural changes, social mobilization, and sectarianism in Lebanon. She was a visiting fellow at the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University in 2018/19. Dr. Majed is the author of numerous articles and op-eds. Her work has appeared in several journals, books and platforms such as Social Forces, Mobilization, Routledge Handbook on the Politics of the Middle East, Middle East Law and Governance, Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East, Global Dialogue, Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology, Al Jumhuriya, OpenDemocracy, Jacobin, Middle East Eye, and Al Jazeera English. She is also the co-editor of the upcoming book The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution (I.B. Taurus).

Rafeef Ziadah is Lecturer in Comparative Politics of the Middle East in the Politics and International Studies Department, SOAS University of London. Her research interests are broadly concerned with the political economy of transport infrastructures, war and humanitarianism, racism and the security state, with a particular focus on the Middle East. Her latest book is Revolutionary Feminisms (Verso, 2020) co-edited Brenna Bhandar.

Moderators


Seteney Shami 
is an anthropologist from Jordan with degrees from the American University in Beirut and U.C. Berkeley. After teaching at Yarmouk University in Jordan and setting up a graduate department of anthropology, she moved in 1996 to the regional office of the Population Council in Cairo as director of the Middle East Awards in Population and the Social Sciences (MEAwards). She has also been a visiting Professor at U.C. Berkeley, Georgetown University, University of Chicago, Stockholm University and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (Uppsala). In July 1999, she joined the Social Science Research Council in New York and is program director for the program on the Middle East and North Africa and also was the program director for Eurasia from 1999-2010. She is also the Founding Director of the newly established Arab Council for the Social Sciences, a regional organization headquartered in Beirut. She has conducted fieldwork in Jordan, Turkey and in the North Caucasus. Her research interests center on issues of ethnicity and nationalism in the context of globalization, urban politics and state-building strategies, and population displacement and trans-national movements.

Adam Hanieh teaches in the Department of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London. His recent publications include Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States (2011); Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East (2013); and (co-edited with Omar Shehabi and Abdulhadi Khalaf) Transit States: Labour, Migration, and Citizenship in the Gulf (2014).


Ten Years On
Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World


This event is part of the Ten Years on Project, a year-long series of events, reflections, and conversations created to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the start of the Arab uprisings in Tunisia. We launched this project in order to interrogate and reflect on the uprisings, with the hope of producing resources for educators, researchers, students, and journalists to understand the last decade of political upheaval historically and in the lived present.

Watch all of our previous Ten Years on events here:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Organizers: Arab Studies Institute, Princeton’s Arab Barometer, George Mason’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program.

Co-Sponsors: Georgetown University (Center for Contemporary Arab Studies), American University of Beirut (Asfari Institute), Arab Council for the Social Sciences, Brown University (Center for Middle East Studies), UC Santa Barbara (Center for Middle East Studies), Harvard University (Center for Middle East Studies), University of Exeter (Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies), Birzeit University (Department of Political Science), University of Chicago (Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory), Stanford University (Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, Stanford University), AUC Affiliates, Georgetown University (Qatar) Center For International And Regional Studies (CIRS), The Global Academy (MESA Affiliated), Institute of Palestine Studies.
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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