Iraq 2023: Twenty Years On—A One-Day Conference on the Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq (31 March)

Iraq 2023: Twenty Years On—A One-Day Conference on the Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq (31 March)

Iraq 2023: Twenty Years On—A One-Day Conference on the Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq (31 March)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Iraq 2023: Twenty Years On 

A One-Day Conference
on the Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq


Friday, 31 March 2023
9:30 AM ET

Georgetown University Intercultural Center Auditorium & Zoom


Co-sponsored by Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, George Mason University Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Department, and Arab Studies Institute


If you encounter registration issues, please contact coco.tait@georgetown.edu.


This event is free and open to the general public.

CCAS, in partnership with George Mason University’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program, and the Arab Studies Institute are proud to host a conference marking the 20-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Panels will explore the invasion’s economic and geopolitical impact, as well as how it has been addressed within Iraqi arts and culture. The conference will also feature a showing of the 2004 documentary About Baghdad, the first film made about Iraq after the fall of the Ba’ath regime in July 2003. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the film’s directors.

SCHEDULE


9:30 AM - 10:00 AM ET: Registration

10:00 AM -11:30 AM ET: The Invasion of Iraq and After: Twenty Years On

12:00 PM - 1:30 PM ET: Perspectives on Cultural Production Post-2003

1:30 PM - 2:30 PM: Lunch

3:00 PM - 4:30 PM ET: Film Screening: About Baghdad

4:30 PM - 5:45 PM ET: Panel Discussion: About Baghdad

5:45 PM - 6:00 PM ET: Closing Remarks 



SESSIONS


The Invasion of Iraq and After: Twenty Years On

(10:00 AM -11:30 AM ET)
Speakers

Sinan Antoon
Poet, novelist, translator, and scholar

Rochelle Davis
The Sultanate of Oman Associate Professor of Anthropology, CCAS, Georgetown University

Pete Moore
Marcus A. Hanna Associate Professor of Politics, Case Western Reserve University

Joseph Sassoon
Director, CCAS; Professor of History and Political Economy; al-Sabah Chair in Politics and Political Economy of the Arab World, CCAS, Georgetown University

Omar Sirri
Research Associate, Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London

Bassam Haddad (moderator)
Founding Director, Middle East and Islamic Studies Program; Associate Professor, Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University 

Perspectives on Cultural Production Post-2003

(12:00 PM – 1:30 PM ET)
Speakers

Muhannad Hayal
Iraqi Filmmaker; winner: Best Film from Busan and Cairo Film Festival (2019) and Rising Star Award from RIIFF, NYC (2014)

Hanan Jasim Khammas
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Lowkey
British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner

Rijin Sahakian
Writer, teacher and art-maker; founder, Sada

Sinan Antoon (moderator)
Poet, novelist, translator, and scholar
 

Film Screening: About Baghdad

(3:00 PM – 4:30 PM ET)
Runtime: 90 minutes

Panel Discussion: About Baghdad

(4:30 PM – 5:45 PM ET)
The speakers and moderator involved in this event constitute the Co-Directors of the film About Baghdad
Speakers

Sinan Antoon
Poet, novelist, translator, and scholar

Maya Mikdashi
Assistant Professor, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies; Lecturer, Program in Middle East Studies, Rutgers University

Suzy Salamy
Filmmaker and social worker

Adam Shapiro
Director of Advocacy for Israel/Palestine, DAWN

Bassam Haddad (moderator)
Founding Director, Middle East and Islamic Studies Program; Associate Professor, Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University

Full speaker biographies can be read here.

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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