LIVE EVENT - Ten Years On Project: Lebanon’s 2022 Parliamentary Elections (30 March)

LIVE EVENT - Ten Years On Project: Lebanon’s 2022 Parliamentary Elections (30 March)

LIVE EVENT - Ten Years On Project: Lebanon’s 2022 Parliamentary Elections (30 March)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The Ten Years On Project Present

Lebanon's 2022 Parliamentary Elections:
An Interdisciplinary Lens


Wednesday, 30 March 2022
12:00 PM ET | 6:00 PM Beirut


This is the ninth 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 studies Institute, George Mason University, The Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship (AUB), Notre Dame University- Louaize (NDU)

Featuring
Kamal Abouchedid
Lina Abou Habib
Christy Mady
Nadim El Kak
Hatim el Hibri (Discussant)
Maria Bou Zeid (Moderator)
 

In the midst of the Lebanese ongoing financial, social and political crises, Lebanon will hold potentially its 2022 parliamentary elections next May. The legislative elections fuel the hope for change to save the country from its profound economic recession and political failure. This panel aims to offer an interdisciplinary analysis of the electoral process with experts from different fields exploring effective approaches to challenging the status quo of the current political system.

Featuring


Kamal Abouchedid holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. He is the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Notre Dame University (Louaize) in Lebanon and faculty member in the rank of Professor. He is also a member of the Lebanese Association for Educational Studies (LAES). He has many publications in specialized journals as well as book chapters and regional reports. These articles and book chapters have dealt with different topics, including youth in marginalized settings.

Lina Abou-Habib (Lebanon) is the director of the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at AUB. She is an expert in mainstreaming gender in development policies and practices and in building capacities for gender mainstreaming in regional and international agencies as well as public institutions. Lina was a Senior Policy Fellow at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs. She is also the MENA Advisor for the Urgent Action Fund

Christy Mady holds a PhD in Communication from Carleton University, Canada and she is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Media Studies at Notre Dame University- Louaize. Equipped with a rich professional academic background, Dr. Mady’s research interests are mainly focused on Pan Arab media, journalism, and the intersection of media with the various social, socio-political, cultural, labor, and legal aspects of gender and sexuality in the SWANA region and mainly Lebanon.

Nadim El Kak is a Beirut-based researcher, freelance writer, and postgraduate student. He works at The Policy Initiative (TPI)  a new local think tank – where he leads research projects on Lebanon's growing landscape of anti-establishment actors. He holds a double B.A. in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies from Amherst College and is completing his M.A. thesis in Sociology at the American University of Beirut. His academic research examines the tensions between (counter) revolution, neoliberal ideology, and radical political imaginaries in Lebanon’s uprising.

Discussant


Hatim El-Hibri is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies. His research and teaching interests focus on global and transnational media, visual culture, Lebanon and the Middle East, critical theory, and the historical entanglement of media technology and institutions with the production and contestation of urban space. His first book, titled Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure, is forthcoming from Duke University Press (2021). In Fall 2019, he was Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School at University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining George Mason, he taught at the American University of Beirut. 

Moderator


Maria Bou Zeid is an Associate Professor and the Chairperson of the Media Studies Department at Notre Dame University-Louaize (NDU). She is also the Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute (ASI) - Beirut Office. Dr. Bou Zeid holds a Doctorate in Media Studies from Université Paris II, Assas, Paris. Her research interests include: Media Ethics and Media Education. She is also engaged in research on higher education in the Arab world tackling issues such as the efforts of Internationalization in the field of Higher Education in the MENA region along with the challenges that the Lebanese Education sector is currently facing.

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