Best 2022 APSA Paper Recognizes Basileus Zeno's Work on the Politics of Sectarianization

Best 2022 APSA Paper Recognizes Basileus Zeno's Work on the Politics of Sectarianization

Best 2022 APSA Paper Recognizes Basileus Zeno's Work on the Politics of Sectarianization

By : Jadaliyya Reports

During the 2023 American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting, Jadaliyya Syria Page Co-Editor Basileus Zeno received the Best 2022 APSA Paper award from the MENA Politics Section. The award recognizes the best paper presented at the previous meeting. Zeno was selected for his paper “The Shifting Rhetorics of the Syrian Uprising: Politics of Sectarianization,” which he presented at the 2022 Annual Meeting in Montreal, Canada last Fall. An honorable mention went to Allison Spencer Hartnett’s (University of Southern California) and Mohamed Saleh’s (London School of Economics) paper “Rural Intra-Elite Conflict, Colonization, and Demands for Power-Sharing: Evidence from Khedival Egypt.

The selection committee, composed of professors Lisel Hintz (Johns Hopkins University), Bozena Welborne (Smith College), and Fotini Christia (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), presented the award in a virtual ceremony on September 1st. 

The award committee highly praised Zeno’s unique contribution to wider scholarship of agency, identity, violence, and international relations: 

This paper addresses the puzzle of how narratives articulated during the Syrian uprising that began in 2011 shifted from calls for political reform to sectarian and militarized discourses. In doing so, the author challenges static and homogenizing treatments of sects and sectarian conflict to unpack how and when the conflict became sectarianized, and by whom. Zeno analyzes the iterative and interactive processes through which the sectarian-coded framing of the conflict promulgated by Syrian elites and supralocal actors on the ground, online, and through Arab satellite channels shaped local activists’ own forms of identification in response to escalating regime violence. The committee found Zeno’s interpretivist approach, which leverages a rich set of data collected through ethnographic observation, interviews, and content analysis of protest slogans and online mobilization, to be particularly well suited to studying relational processes of boundary-making. We found the paper’s analysis of how, as Zeno writes, “sect” as a “residual sociality” becomes activated politically to be highly compelling and extremely well developed. The committee commends the author for the deep dive into the Syrian case, and believes paper makes an important contribution to wider studies of agency, identity, and violence on a topic of great societal importance for MENA and beyond. 

A peer-reviewed version of this paper has been published in Nations and Nationalism as an open access with the support of a grant (identifier: G-18-55718) from Carnegie Corporation of New York for the LSE-based Grant number Legitimacy and citizenship in the Arab world research project. The same work has also won the Syrian Studies Association (SSA) annual prize for the most outstanding article at the 2022 Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Annual Meeting.  

You can watch a conversation with Basileus Zeno moderated by Bassam Haddad about the Politics of Sectarianization in Syria below.

In related news, earlier this year, Zeno’s collaborative policy work on asylum in the United States was recognized nationally for its impact on the United States immigration law practices. His co-authored policy report, "Lives in Limbo: How the Boston Asylum Office Fails Asylum Seekers," received the 2022 Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) Award for Excellence in a Public Interest Case or Project. The report was published in partnership between the Refugee and Human Rights Clinic at the University of Maine School of Law, the ACLU of Maine, the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP) and Zeno. It is the first ever comprehensive analysis of the inner workings of an asylum office in the United States. It investigates the problematic practices of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s Boston Asylum Office (BAO) and shows how the stunningly low approval rate for affirmative asylum petitions at the BAO causes further trauma to asylum seekers and endangers their family members abroad. The report details findings from analysis of documents and data received as a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. Additionally, it builds on interviews with asylees, asylum seekers, former asylum officers, and immigration attorneys. It exposes systemic problems with adjudication of affirmative asylum applications across the United Sates, including bias, a culture of distrust toward asylum seekers, and violations of their due process rights.   

You can watch a conversation with Basileus Zeno moderated by Mouin Rabbani about Asylum in the USA below.

 

Basileus Zeno is a Sessional Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at York University in Canada, and a co-editor of Jadaliyya’s Syria Page. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2021. Following that, he was awarded Karl Loewenstein Fellowship in Political Science at Amherst College. Basileus also holds a B.A. and M.A. in Classical and Islamic Archaeology from Damascus University (Syria), and M.A. in Political Science and International Relations from Ohio University (USA). He was a MESA Global Academy Fellow between 2021and 2023.

Zeno’s writing has been published in academic as well as public-facing outlets, including Nations and Nationalism, Middle East Law and Governance, Digest of Middle East Studies, and The Washington Post. Additionally, Zeno received grants from major international institutions, including the Open Society Foundations, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and London School of Economics and Political Science. His work has combined research, advocacy and policy work on political violence, forced migration, international security, human rights, and decolonizing methodologies. He has been invited by academic and public institutions as a writer and speaker on issues related to Syria, war, and displacement. He presented his work globally at academic institutions such as the University of Chicago, Harvard University, Duke University, UCLA, UC San Diego, University of Vienna, University of Guelph, Wesleyan University, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Wellesley College, and numerous other places.

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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