You are kindly invited to the first EUME Berliner Seminar in the Winter Term 2022/23 that will take place on Wednesday, 12 October 2022 at 5 pm (CEST) on-site at Forum Transregionale Studien (Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin). This seminar addresses the topic

The Second Wave of Arab Uprisings: Moving Beyond Narratives of Defeat and Despair

discussed by
Zahra Ali (Rutgers University-Newark)
Leyla Dakhli (CNRS / Centre Marc Bloch)
Magdi El Gizouli (StillSudan.blogspot.com)
Cilja Harders (Freie Universität Berlin / EUME)
Jeffrey G. Karam (Lebanese American University / EUME Fellow 2020-23)

The roundtable discussion provides an alternative reading of the second wave of Arab revolutionary uprisings that erupted in 2018, especially in Sudan and later in Lebanon, Iraq, and other Arab states in 2019. By moving beyond narratives and analyses that primarily focus on moments of defeat and despair, the panelists will discuss if and how the uprisings that unfolded in Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere ushered a new and important phase in social activism and political subjectivities that deserves attention. By addressing the role of new alternative organizations, including professional associations, syndicates, political movements, and other entities, the roundtable highlights some vital social, economic, and political trends common across various Arab societies.
 

Zahra Ali is a Sociologist and Assistant Professor at Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of Women and Gender in Iraq (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and the co-author of Decolonial Pluriversalism (Rowman & Littlefield, forthc. with Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun). Her current research takes the October 2019 uprising in Iraq as a framework to understand contemporary dynamics of protests and social movements. It looks at recent massive protests in Iraq through the lens of space, body politics, materiality and affects. It argues that centering Iraqi protesters' subjectivities and experiences, their politics of life and death, expands our political and theoretical imagination on empire, feminism, and emancipation.

Leyla Dakhli is a full-time historian in the French Center for National Research (CNRS), presently settled in the Marc Bloch Center in Berlin. Her work deals with the study of Arab intellectuals and social history of the South Mediterranean region, with a particular focus on the history of women and the question of exiled intellectuals and activists. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded program DREAM (Drafting and Enacting the revolution in the Arab Mediterranean). She is a member of the editorial committee of the International Review of Social History (Amsterdam) and Le Mouvement social (Paris), and of the Scientific Committee of the MuCem (Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, Marseilles). Her last publications include Histoire du Proche-Orient contemporain, Paris, La Découverte, 2015 ; Le Moyen-Orient (fin XIXe-XXe siècle), Éditions du Seuil "Points Histoire", nov. 2016 ; L’Esprit de la révolte. Archives et actualité des révolutions arabes, Éditions du Seuil, oct. 2020. With Amin Allal, Layla Baamara, Giula Fabbiano, Cheminements révolutionnaires. Un an de mobilisations en Algérie (2019-2020), Paris, CNRS éditions, 2021.

Magdi el Gizouli is a scholar of the Sudans and a fellow of the Rift Valley Institute. He will be talking about the role of informal labour in the revolutionary events of 2018/2019 in Sudan, the transformations of Sudan’s labour force over the past few decades, its history and traditions of radicalism.

Cilja Harders is a political scientist and heads the “Center for Middle Eastern and North African Politics” at the Otto-Suhr Institute for Political Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin. She has extensive research experience in the Middle East and has published on participation and transformation, „politics from below”, affect, emotion and politics, Arab-European Relations as well as gender relations. She has been directing several exchange and research projects including partners from Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Jordan. Her current research project looks at authoritarianism, political participation, emotion and affect in Egypt and Turkey in the framework of a collaborative research centre. In 2022, she published on the Arab Revolutions, Affect and Emotion in the German periodical “Mittelweg”2022.

Jeffrey G. Karam is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Lebanese American University. He is currently a Research Fellow with the Global Scholarly Dialogue Programme of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, affiliated with EUME and the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Politics at Freie Universität Berlin. He has held postdoctoral fellowships and visiting professorships at Harvard University and Boston University. As a scholar-activist between Beirut and Berlin, Karam's research and writing focus on the politics of intelligence and foreign policy, revolutions and counter-revolutions, and transformational moments of political change in West Asia and North Africa, with an emphasis on the Arab world. Karam is the editor of The Middle East in 1958: Reimagining A Revolutionary Year(London: I.B. Tauris and Bloomsbury, 2020) and co-editor of The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution (London: I.B. Tauris and Bloomsbury, 2022). Karam is the author of numerous publications, and his research has been published in academic and public outlets, including Intelligence and National Security, the Arab Studies Journal, Journal of Political Science Education, The Washington Post, H-Diplo/ISSF, open Democracy, the Daily Star Lebanon, Megaphone, Jadaliyya. From 2018-2022, Karam was a non-resident Research Associate at Harvard University’s Middle East Initiative, and in the academic year 2022/23, he continues to be affiliated with EUME.

Please note that this seminar will take place on-site at the Forum Transregionale Studien. If you want to attend the seminar, we kindly ask you to register in advance via eume@trafo-berlin.de.
Depending on approval by the speakers, the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available via SoundCloud.

Looking forward to seeing you at the EUME Berliner Seminar!