Security in Context Webinar: Understanding U.S., Russian, and Chinese Foreign Policy (15 February)

Security in Context Webinar: Understanding U.S., Russian, and Chinese Foreign Policy (15 February)

Security in Context Webinar: Understanding U.S., Russian, and Chinese Foreign Policy (15 February)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Security in Context presents
 

Webinar:
Understanding U.S., Russian, and Chinese Foreign Policy


Tuesday, 15 February 2022
2:30 PM EST | 7:30 PM GMT

 

Please join Security in Context on Tuesday, 15 February at 2:30 PM US EST, 7:30 PM GMT for a discussion on the goals and consequences of U.S., Russian, and Chinese Foreign Policy. This webinar is part of a series convened by Security in Context to explore the implications of Multipolarity and 21st Century geopolitics on the global South.

Speakers 


Lee Jones is Professor of Political Economy and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. His research focuses on security, governance and development in the Asia-Pacific. His books include: Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China’s Rise (with Shahar Hameiri, Cambridge University Press, 2021), The Political Economy of Southeast Asia: Politics and Markets Under Hyperglobalisation (co-edited with Toby Carroll and Shahar Hameiri, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Governing Borderless Threats: Non-traditional Security and the Politics of State Transformation (with Shahar Hameiri, Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Societies Under Siege: Exploring How International Economic Sanctions (Do Not) Work (Oxford University Press, 2015). His website is www.leejones.tk and he tweets at @DrLeeJones.

Michael Klare, Five College professor emeritus of peace and world security studies and senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association at Hampshire College, holds a B.A. and M.A. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of the Union Institute. He has written widely on U.S. military policy, international peace and security affairs, the global arms trade, and global resource politics. He has written fifteen books, including Resource Wars (2001), Blood and Oil (2004), The Race for What's Left (2012), and All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change (2019). His articles have appeared in many journals, including Arms Control Today, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Current History, Foreign Affairs, Harper's, The Nation, The National Interest, Newsweek, Scientific American, and Technology Review.

Dave Lewis is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Exeter working in the fields of peace and conflict studies, and the politics of authoritarian states. In regional terms, most of his research has explored post-Soviet politics, notably in Central Asia and the Caucasus, but retains a strong interest in the politics of Sri Lanka. In 2012-16 Lewis was co-investigator on an ESRC-funded research project entitled 'Rising Powers and Conflict Management in Central Asia'. Before joining the University of Exeter in September 2013 Lewis was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford. He  completed his PhD in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics, and subsequently worked in political risk analysis in the private sector. He also spent several years working for the Brussels-based think-tank, the International Crisis Group, in their research programmes in Central Asia and in South Asia.

Min Ye is associate professor at Pardee School of Boston University. She served as the Director of East Asian Studies (2010-2014) at BU. Her publications include The Belt, Road and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Diasporas and Foreign Direct Investment in China and India (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and The Making of Northeast Asia (with Kent Calder, Stanford University Press, 2010). Ye received her Ph.D. at Princeton University and a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. She is also the recipient of a Smith Richardson Foundation grant, the East Asia Peace, Prosperity, and Governance fellowship, Japan’s Millennium Education scholarship, and the Public Intellectual fellowship of the National Committee on the U.S-China Relations.

Omar S. Dahi (Moderator) is a co-editor of Jadaliyya and an associate professor of economics at Hampshire College and co-director of the Peacebuilding and State building program and research associate at the Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research interests are in the political economy of development in the Middle East, South-South relations, comparative regionalism, peace and conflict studies, and critical security studies. He has published in academic outlets such as the Journal of Development EconomicsApplied EconomicsSouthern Economic JournalPolitical GeographyMiddle East ReportForced Migration Review, and Critical Studies on Security. His last book South-South Trade and Finance in the 21st Century: Rise of the South or a Second Great Divergence (co-authored with Firat Demir) explores the ambiguous developmental impact of the new economic linkages among countries of the global South. He has served on the editorial collective of Middle East Report and is a co-founder and co-director of the Beirut School for Critical Security Studies working group at the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS). Dahi is also the founder and director of the Security in Context initiative.

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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