Except Palestine: Conflict, Development and De-Development

*Please note this is a ticketed event, please register here.

 

On December 29, the International Court of Justice announced South Africa's application against Israel, citing Genocide Convention violations concerning Palestinians in Gaza. In the first hearing on January 11, Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC, Counsel and Advocate for South Africa, noted “this is a population that Israel had already made vulnerable through 16 years of military blockade and crippling de-development."

Join us for the third instalment in the "Except Palestine" series, hosted across London universities. Our distinguished panel will analyse the economic, legal, and social challenges stemming from the current situation, placing it within the longer history and broader discourse on development and de-development.

 Speakers

• Professor Neve Gordon, Queen Mary University of London
• Professor Yasmin Gunaratnam, King’s College London
• Professor Laleh Khalili, University of Exeter
• Professor Daanish Mustafa, King’s College London
• Dr. Muna Dajani, London School of Economics
• Chair - Dr Rafeef Ziadah, King's College London

 Dr. Neve Gordon is a professor of human rights law at Queen Mary University of London and the Chair of the British Society for Middle East Studies. His first book, Israel’s Occupation , provided a structural history of Israel’s mechanisms of control in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. His second book, The Human Right to Dominate was written with Nicola Perugini and examines how human rights, which are generally conceived as tools for advancing emancipation, can also be used to enhance subjugation and dispossession. Most recently, he wrote with Perugini the first book on the legal and political history of human shielding. Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire follows the marginal and controversial figure of the human shield over a period of 150 years in order to interrogate the laws of war and how the ethics of humane violence is produced. Gordon has also edited two volumes, one on torture (with Ruchama Marton) and the other on marginalized perspectives on human rights. Gordon has been a member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Brown University, the University of Michigan, and SOAS, and is currently a board member of the International State Crime Initiative. He writes regularly for the popular press and his articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Al Jazeera, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The London Review of Books.

Dr. Yasmin Gunaratnam is a Professor in Social Justice in King’s College London School of Education, Communication & Society. She is interested in how different types of inequality and injustice are produced, lived with and remade and how these processes create new forms of local and global inclusion and dispossession. Before she came to King's in September 2021, Yasmin taught in the Sociology department at Goldsmiths and was co-director of the Centre for Feminist Research. Yasmin is also a yoga teacher, exploring contemplative social justice and embodied pedagogies.

 Dr. Laleh Khalili is a Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter. Her writing has examined the representations and practices of violence including in her first two book, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: the Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge 2007) and Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgency (Stanford 2013) as well as in a volume she co-edited with Jillian Schwedler, titled Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion (Hurst 2010). Her most recent book, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso 2020), examines the role of maritime infrastructures as conduits of movement of technologies, capital, people and cargo. She have also written articles (in edited volumes, journals, museum catalogues and magazines) on a range of subjects from the politics of pleasure and gendered subjectivities to trade, finance, collective memory, and the role of happiness in counterinsurgencies.

 Dr. Daanish Mustafa is a Professor in Critical Geography in the King’s College London Geography Department. His research interests have been in water resources geography, environmental hazards, development and critical geographies of violence and terror. He obtained his BA in Geography from Middlebury College, USA, his MA from University of Hawai'i Manoa, and his PhD in Geography from University of Colorado.

He has taught at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA and then at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg, before finding his intellectual home in the Department of Geography. While at King's, he has received the School of Social Science and Public Policy excellence in teaching award.

His research has been funded by the Belmont Forum, International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Department for International Development (DfID), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), National Geographic Society, Royal Geographical Society, and the British Academy. He was the co-author of the first climate change response strategies for Pakistan, in addition to being the lead author for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Pakistan five-year flood response strategy. In addition, he has also undertaken policy-related work with the DfID, International Organization for Migration (IOM), Stimson Centre, and United States Institute for Peace (USIP).

Dr. Muna Dajani is an action researcher with a background in critical political ecology. Her work aims to understand environmental and water governance through decolonial and critical lenses. Her research focused on examining community struggles for rights to water and land resources in settler colonial contexts in Palestine and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, with special attention to infrastructure, water and farming. Dajani is currently a Fellow in Environment at the Geography and Environment Department at LSE.

Dr Rafeef Ziadah is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy in the KCL Department of International Development. Her research focuses broadly on political economy, gender and race, with a particular focus on the Middle East and East Africa. Rafeef is co-editor (with Brenna Bhandar) of the book Revolutionary Feminisms (Verso press 2020).

She holds a PhD in Politics from York University, Canada. Previously she was a Lecturer in the Politics and International Studies department, SOAS University of London and Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the 'Military Mobilities and Mobilising Movements in the Middle East' project. This ESRC funded project explored the politics of transport infrastructures in the Arabian Peninsula and culminated in the production of the website Sinews of War and Trade.

Her research on infrastructures and maritime politics has appeared in Politics, Antipode; Conflict, Security & Development; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; among other venues. Rafeef has worked as researcher and campaigns organiser with a number of refugee rights and anti-poverty NGOs.

 

This is a free event, which means we overbook to allow for no-shows and avoid empty seats. While we generally do not have to turn people away, this does mean we cannot guarantee all ticket holders a place. Admission is on a first come, first served basis. Those without tickets will not be admitted.