Date:
Location:
CMES Modern Middle East Speaker Series presents
Noura Erakat: Justice for Some: Law As Politics in the Question of Palestine
Seth Anziska: Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo
Tareq Baconi: Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, Department of Africana Studies. Her research interests include humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, and critical race theory. Noura is the author of Justice for Some: Law As Politics in the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019). She is a Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine and an Editorial Committee member of the Journal of Palestine Studies. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, as a Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as the national grassroots organizer and legal advocate at the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Noura is the coeditor of Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures, an anthology related to the 2011 and 2012 Palestine bids for statehood at the UN. More recently, Noura released a pedagogical project on the Gaza Strip and Palestine, which includes a short multimedia documentary, "Gaza In Context," that rehabilitates Israel’s wars on Gaza within a settler-colonial framework. She is also the producer of the short video, "Black Palestinian Solidarity." She is a frequent commentator, with recent appearances on CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NPR, among others, and her writings have been widely published in the national media and academic journals.
Seth Anziska is the Mohamed S. Farsi-Polonsky Associate Professor of Jewish-Muslim Relations at University College London. His research and teaching focuses on Israeli and Palestinian society and culture, modern Middle Eastern history, and contemporary Arab and Jewish politics. He is the author of Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo (Princeton University Press, 2018), and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and The New York Review of Books. Seth received his PhD in International and Global History from Columbia University, his M. Phil. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and his BA in history from Columbia University. He was a 2019 Fulbright Scholar at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, and has held visiting positions at Dartmouth College, New York University, the London School of Economics, and the American University of Beirut.
Tareq Baconi is the Analyst for Israel/Palestine and Economics of Conflict at the International Crisis Group based in Jerusalem. He is the author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, (Stanford University Press, 2018). Alongside his academic career, Tareq has a background in management consulting in the energy sector. His research relates to the contemporary geopolitics of the region. His writing has appeared in Arabic in Al-Ghad and Al-Quds al-Arabi, and in English in The New York Review Daily, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The Nation, The Daily Star (Lebanon), and al-Jazeera. He has provided analysis for print and broadcast media, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, BBC, National Public Radio, and Democracy Now!. He has a PhD in International Relations from King’s College London, an MPhil in International Relations degree from the University of Cambridge and an MEng in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College London.
Discussant: Sara Roy, Associate of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Sara Roy (Ed.D. Harvard University) is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies specializing in the Palestinian economy, Palestinian Islamism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Dr. Roy is also co-chair of the Middle East Seminar, jointly sponsored by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and co-chair of the Middle East Forum at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Dr. Roy began her research in the Gaza Strip and West Bank in 1985 with a focus on the economic, social, and political development of the Gaza Strip and on U.S. foreign assistance to the region. Since then she has written extensively on the Palestinian economy, particularly in Gaza, and on Gaza’s de-development, a concept she originated. Dr. Roy is the author of The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995, 2001, third edition 2016 with a new introduction and afterword; Arabic edition forthcoming in 2019); The Gaza Strip Survey (The West Bank Data Base Project, 1986); Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (Pluto Press, 2007); and editor, The Economics of Middle East Peace: A Reassessment, Research in Middle East Economics, Volume 3 (Middle East Economic Association and JAI Press, 1999). Her book, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector (Princeton University Press, 2011; 2014, with a new afterword), was a winner of a 2012 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Prize in Middle Eastern Studies. It was also chosen one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles and one of the Top 25 Academic Books for 2012. The research for this book was funded by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Dr. Roy also has authored over 100 publications dealing with Palestinian issues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia among other international venues.
Contact: Liz Flanagan