MESA Global Academy Winter 2023 Newsletter

MESA Global Academy Winter 2023 Newsletter

MESA Global Academy Winter 2023 Newsletter

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following is the MESA Global Academy Winter 2023 Newsletter. Click here to learn more about the Global Academy and its efforts.]

The Middle East Studies Association Global Academy was thrilled to meet in person at the MESA Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, December 1-4, 2022. Please see below for information on our events at the meeting, latest publications, and plans for the Spring 2023 semester.

Global Academy scholars present their research on Afghanistan at the MESA Annual Meeting in Denver, December 4, 2022.
 

The Global Academy at the MESA Annual Meeting


The Global Academy hosted three events at the MESA Annual Meeting this year. We welcomed current and alumni scholars, partners, donors, and friends at a lunch where many attendees met in person for the first time and heard about the program's accomplishments to date as well as our plans for the future, which include a broader MESA-wide mentoring network and supporting more scholars located in the MENA region in addition to those in North America. 

The Global Academy also organized two workshops at which current scholars presented their research. The first, "Constraints on Politics, Education, and the Economy: Dispatches from the Region," featured Dr. Ahmed Abdrabou of the University of Denver; Dr. Dina Hadad, formerly of Kuwait International Law School, Dr. Hamid Alawadhi of the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Bengi Gumrukcu of Rutgers University, and Dr. Hossein Hafezian of Montclair State University. Dr. Laurie Brand of the University of Southern California served as moderator and discussant. The second, "The Nation, the Taliban, and Authoritarianism: Developments in Afghanistan," featured Dr. Sharif Hozoori of Cornell University, Dr. Sayed Hassan Akhlaq of Marymount University, Dr. Homeira Qaderi of Harvard University, Dr. Haroun Rahimi of the American University of Afghanistan, and Dr. Omar Sadr of the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Marya Hannun of the University of Exeter served as moderator and discussant.

To listen to a portion of the panel on Afghanistan, please click the button below.

MESA Executive Director Jeff Reger chats with George Washington University Professor of Anthropology Ilana Feldman and George Washington University Professor of Political Science and International Affairs Nathan Brown at the Global Academy lunch. 


MESA Global Academy Scholar Dr. Hamid Alawadhi (center) ran into two childhood friends from Yemen at the MESA Annual Meeting. 


MESA Global Academy Committee Members Dr. Judith Tucker, Ms. Mimi Kirk, Dr. Asli Bali, and Dr. Beth Baron meet for breakfast at the MESA Annual Meeting. 
 

Jadaliyya's Scholars in Context: The Latest from MESA Global Academy Scholars


Jadaliyya's Scholars in Context series features Q&As with Global Academy scholars in which they describe their research and the paths they took to arrive at it. Please see below for the latest in the series.  

Sayed Hassan Akhlaq

Dina Hadad

Homeira Qaderi 

Haroun Rahimi 

Omar Sadr 

Mustafa Saqib

Upcoming Events


This spring we are excited to be organizing, in collaboration with our university partners, a combination of online and in-person events. These will include a panel on the challenges of post-conflict, transitional contexts for cultural production, cultural studies and cultural rights at UCLA; a panel on law, political regimes, and order in the Middle East hosted by the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago; and a panel on Afghanistan at Harvard University. To be kept abreast of our events, please visit our website.

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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