Call for Applications: PhD Studentship - Transnational Solidarity in the Global Cold War: Egyptian-Southern African Relations

Call for Applications: PhD Studentship - Transnational Solidarity in the Global Cold War: Egyptian-Southern African Relations

Call for Applications: PhD Studentship - Transnational Solidarity in the Global Cold War: Egyptian-Southern African Relations

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Applications are invited for a fully funded three-year CHASE doctoral studentship, jointly supervised within the Departments of Politics and International Studies (SOAS University of London), History, Classics and Archaeology (Birkbeck College, University of London), and the Arab and African Research Center (AARC) in Egypt. 

Project


The studentship will support interdisciplinary (Politics and History) research examining the dynamics and dilemmas of transnational solidarity as exemplified in Egypt's role as sponsor of Southern African liberation movements during the 1960s. This will be one of the first studies of its kind, contributing to scholarship on the Cold War, Afro-Asian decolonisation, and African liberation struggles’ contemporary legacies. 

This project’s overall aims are to retrieve and analyse the shifting motivations, power balances, and mutual influences driving relations between the Egyptian state and the southern African liberation movements which it sponsored during the era of decolonisation, and to engage with theories of solidarity in politics and historical geography to evaluate these.

The successful candidate might focus specifically on one or a combination of the following questions: the nature of Egyptian diplomatic, financial support to, and influence on Southern African liberation movements; the place of Egypt in the political imaginaries of nationalist liberation activists'; the implications of the case study for theories of transnational solidarity; the role of Cairo as a Cold War city.

Supervision  


The three supervisors will be Dr Reem Abou-El-Fadl (Politics, SOAS), Dr Hilary Sapire (History, Birkbeck) and Professor Helmi Sharawy (Director, AARC). This is an opportunity to work with two disciplinary/regional experts, and with both a scholar and former co-ordinator of African liberation movements in Egypt’s presidency (1958-1971).

Requirements  


The PhD will commence in October 2022. The student will spend at least three months each at the AARC, and at archives in South Africa. Fluency in Arabic, a capacity to travel freely in Africa, and a first-class degree in Politics/History are essential.

Benefits


The candidate will benefit from two world-leading Departments, enjoying specialisms in Middle East and African politics at SOAS, with its internationally renowned research library, and expertise in global history, transnationalism, and African History at Birkbeck. Rigorous methods training will be offered at both institutions. The candidate will join the AARC’s Africanist research network and gain special access to its archives/publications. They will also participate in the University of London Southern African seminar series events and workshops.

Funding Amount


For the academic year 2022-23, the stipend will be £18,612 with London weighting. This includes an enhanced stipend to cover additional travel costs relating to the project. The funding will cover UK or international fees as needed.

How to Apply


Applications for this studentship must be made via the SOAS University of London application form, available at this link, by Friday 6 May 2022 at 12 noon. Applicants must provide two references in support of their application.

Candidates will be assessed by a shortlisting process, and shortlisted candidates will be interviewed. Interview outcomes will be received by the Management Board for approval.

For the full advert and more information, please click here: https://www.chase.ac.uk/cdas/egyptian-southern-african-relations.

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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