Diala Lteif

An estimated one million people were displaced during the height of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). The Ta'if Agreement, which brought an end to the fighting, was to address past forced migration and offer return to internally displaced people (IDPs). But more than three decades on, some of the most vulnerable Lebanese communities remain displaced, their plight largely absent from mainstream political and academic discourse. This paper explores the struggle of the last remaining IDPs of East Beirut, Arab Al Maslakh, in their quest to return home. Arab Al Maslakh—or Arabs of the Slaughterhouse—were a nomadic tribe of cattle merchants who settled in the late Ottoman era near Beirut’s slaughterhouse, in an area today known as Karantina. As a predominantly Muslim group, they were displaced to West Beirut in January 1976 following the civil war’s first massacres by Christian militias. In their absence, Karantina hosted the headquarters and training bases of these same militias—sites that were subsequently transferred to the Lebanese Army upon conclusion of the war. Arab Al Maslakh remain displaced from their homes and land, forced to negotiate with a Lebanese state apparatus whose both presence and absence has facilitated and perpetuated their ongoing displacement. The visible spatial presence of the Lebanese Army within Karantina, perhaps counterintuitively, brings into stark relief the absence of a clear state interlocutor for Arab Al Maslakh. Despite years of advocating for a solution, the IDPs grievances have only been met with state inaction. In this paper, I argue that this inaction helps constitute a larger policy of mass dispossession targeting Lebanon’s most vulnerable. In turn, I show how identitarian divisions intersect with state, space, and displacement within Beirut’s urban history.

Fatima Ahmed

In recent times, Canada’s nonobligatory responses to domestic violence-based asylum claims have demonstrated how Canada approaches issues of domestic violence in the context of refugee law. The public-private divide as well as the dichotomy of ‘exotic’ and ‘familiar’ harms greatly affect the Canadian notion of gender-based persecution, especially when concerning Muslim refugee women. In the context of the international refugee regime, Muslim women are forced to perform certain orientalist and cultural stereotypes which draw the attention of refugee receiving countries, such as Canada. In analyzing the case of Rahaf Mohammed, this paper proposes that Canada is less likely to offer protection to Muslim refugee women unless they “play the victim,” and in this way, promotes sexist and racist treatment of Muslim refugee women.

Nisrine chaer

Despite hosting the highest proportion of refugees per capita in the world, Lebanon refuses to recognize the designation of refugee status, and imposes restrictive residency permit guidelines and securitization policies that create impediments to the mobility of Syrian refugees, most of whom lack legal residency and live under extreme poverty. Against this backdrop of racialized state violence that characterizes refugee governance in Lebanon, transgender refugees occupy a particular position, where they live simultaneously as “refugee deviants” and as “transgender deviants”. “Doubly deviant” transgender refugee subjects lack access to documentation (as deportable migrants without legal residency or UNHCR refugee status, and as transgender subjects with incongruent gender markers), to passing as “real” women and men in a heteronormative and gendered public and private space, and to capital. In this sense, (non-passing) transgender refugee bodies are simultaneously invisiblized and hypervisiblized by the nation-state, non-state actors, and social norms. Using ethnographic data from participant observation and interviews with Syrian transgender refugees in Lebanon, this article investigates what security means for hypervisible subjects who are outside of the framework of the law and who experience double illegality and erasure. It does so by developing the relationship between the notions of hypervisibility, (dis)respectability, and space.

David Semaan

The Canadian state and private firms in the global north continue to have an economic and geopolitical interest in selling surveillance software to counties in the SWANA region that have histories of repression toward queer communities. Countries such as Egypt, Lebanon and Syria have extensive records of using this technology to monitor, harass or incarcerate LGBTQ+ people and organizational leaders. This paper intends to investigate repressive state practices and use of technologies that state police and military officials use to monitor text messages, dating app usage and images, intending to catfish or ‘sexploit’ members of the LGBTQ+ community. This research intends to shed light on the queer politics of intimacy in South West Asian and North African (SWANA) queer modernity, and the difficult negotiations queer people make both at home and in the diaspora to live out their queerness. My research investigates the vested interests of global north nation states such as Canada, the UK, Germany as well as private firms, who domestically claim to support LGTBQ+ rights, and continue to invest in the political economy of surveillance selling products to repressive states used to monitor queer communities in the SWANA region. The political economy of surveillance and carceral technology facilitates Western states’ imperial reach into other geopolitical regions, while SWANA states develop these tools to widen their legal, religious and moral authority over definitions of proper normative citizens and position themselves as apart from the West. This investigative research into global economy of surveillance raises implications for developing abolitionist possibilities in redefining identity and intimacy in South West Asian and North African modernity, with queer people as its protagonists.

Samira Lavei

The image of the female warrior has been romanticized in the media, thus creating the impression that women preforming similar roles as men during combat represents a step forward in achieving gender equality. It is a misconception that the involvement of women in combat is a milestone in achieving feminist objectives. This research uses a critical feminist framework that argues that gender relations within non-state militant groups, specifically guerrilla groups in Kurdistan-Turkey and Kurdistan-Iraq are repeatedly altered and influenced by the hierarchal structures of power throughout the process of militarization before, during and post conflict. Therefore, while participation in guerrilla groups alters gender relations, it does not always facilitate equality and at times can reproduce marginalization and oppression of women in guerrilla groups and within their respective communities. This research begins by situating discussions of gender within the field of international relations and then explores the topic of women and war and specifically the varied roles that women hold in situations of conflict and violence. This research is divided into three main sections. First, I will be providing an overview of the construction of gender during times of war and its place within the study of International Relations (IR). Second, this research will examine the role of women and gender relations in the case study of Kurdistan- Turkey and Kurdistan-Iraq before, during and post conflict. Lastly, this attempt to examine how gender-based equality and resistance is conceptualized by female guerrilla members within the Kurdish regions.

Rasmieyh Abdelnabi

In this paper, I investigate the making of an informal politics by way of social reproduction for those living under settler colonialism and military occupation. I look at the ways in which women, through their everyday practices of survival and refusal, create a politics of life. Anthropologist Didier Fassin coined the term “politics of life” to refer to an understanding of politics not from the outside, but from the inside and “in the flesh of the everyday experience[s]” (Fassin, 2009, 57). I expand on Fassin and Ilana Feldman’s work by focusing on social reproduction as a gendered politics of life, a politics that seeks to understand how ordinary women operate within their everyday lives and unintentionally “act politically” (Feldman, 2018, 4). I use Palestinian embroidery to explore this concept. I have discovered that women are embroidering the very cultural materials that hold up a nation and a fragmented people. The women who embroider the pieces that carry Palestine all over the world would not be considered politically active since they are unseen, their work is done in silence and at home, but their work is the backbone of Palestinian culture and heritage. Embroidery serves as material expression of Palestinian experience, history, and identity. Embroidery is an act of refusal in the face of settler colonialism and serves multiple purposes: a source of economic self-sustenance, creates an invisible (ironically through vibrant and colorful materials) historical and cultural connection shared by Palestinians across the world, and creates a futurity by enabling cultural preservation and cultural continuity in the face of erasure, fragmentation, and dispossession.

Samiha Olwan

In the last two decades, the online space has offered Palestinians a significant platform for self-representation. The space has allowed for narratives of national identity to emerge, where memories are evoked, home is reconstructed and imagined, and an everyday narrative of the conflict is made available to local and global interlocutors. In this paper, I examine the online narratives of Palestinian women bloggers who are writing from the position of anticolonial struggle, and I explore the ways in which gender is written into and represented by their accounts. From a postcolonial feminist perspective, I consider how these women’s writing enables them to negotiate their gendered identities and their feminist concerns in a context where questions of the nation are prioritised, and where women are typically assigned a primarily symbolic significance in bearing the nation biologically, culturally, and nationally. This negotiation manifests itself in the way these women write themselves out of these conventional nationalist and allegorical roles, and offer alternative ways of narrating and imagining the nation as the bloggers question their previously assigned roles in the national struggle. In this sense, this paper reveals the women’s part in the larger dynamic struggle between politics and narrative, as women stand at the crossroads of colonial, orientalist, nationalist and gendered constructions of the nation. Most importantly, the paper asks how these women make informed, gendered choices in response to an already gendered national narrative.

Maysam Abu Khreibeh

Since 1967, through the ongoing environmental nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), over 900,000 olive trees have been uprooted by Israeli settlers causing devastating economic and ecological effects on the Palestinian people and the fellahin. Fellah is the Arabic word meaning “farmer” or “village agriculturalists” (plural fellahin) whose lives are inextricably intertwined with their stewardship of the land. This paper examines accumulation by dispossession and the missing element of (settler) coloniality and racial capitalism through a close study of olive tree destruction in Palestine. A neoliberal apartheid framework is applied to highlight a correlation between racial capital mechanisms of “coercive exploitation” and a settler colonial “logic of elimination” to analyse the effects on human relations of capital and the transformation of nature in Palestine. Indigeneity is a nuanced concept that is not bound and distorted within colonial state racial definitions. Indigeneity stems from an inextricable connection with the land and ecological environment that transcends identity politics and their origins. Indigenous epistemologies of Palestinian fellahin are foundational to the Palestinian geopolitical struggle and resistance against neoliberal apartheid. Through sutra, a’wana, and sumud — three acts of Palestinian fellahin values and daily forms of resistance — this paper will discuss the ways that fellahin communities challenge Zionist notions of “doing-being-becoming-belonging” on the land. Through everyday acts of resistance, survival, and revival of fellahin knowledges and connection to the land, fellahin hold the knowledge and experience for anti-colonial and anti-capitalist futurities that both challenge and transcend beyond settler colonial state formations and neoliberal apartheid conditions.

Soumyadeep Bidyanta

The paper looks at the effect of external intervention in the Arab Spring. The paper goes over the history of external intervention in the region of Middle East. It then goes on to give a brief overview of the events of the Arab Spring in every country involved. It then looks at case studies involving 6 countries, three in which substantial intervention took place, and another three in which substantial intervention did not take place. It draws certain conclusions, namely that external intervention often worsened the intensity of the conflict, and that while intervention on one side proved decisive, intervention on both sides only dragged on the conflict instead of providing a quick resolution. Next, it predicts why intervention would be a continuing feature of Middle Eastern geopolitics through the prism of Game Theory. Finally, the paper seeks to provide a possible resolution for the problem through an international agreement.

Nuzhat Khurshid

“What is East and what is West? What is the tradition of a person who is fighting for freedom and empowerment? …Might it not, if one so chooses, be, or become, the international group of women or of people who respect the equality and dignity of women?” asks Martha Nussbaum in her book, Sex and Social Justice. If the struggle for women’s rights is, indeed, an international issue, then what are the normative universal feminist values we should endorse? Does Nussbaum’s vision of liberal internationalism offer women of the Third World sufficient theoretical tools with which to understand their material, political and ethical struggles? Serene Khader, in Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic, presents an alternative vision. She argues that “an understanding of feminism as opposition to sexist oppression, coupled with an understanding of transnational feminist praxis as aiming at justice enhancement in a world characterized by historical and ongoing imperialism, can form the basis of an anti-imperialist and universalist feminism.” In so doing, she rejects Nussbaum’s view of liberal internationalism, or what she calls “missionary feminism” which equates women’s progress with their adoption of specific Western values. She presents a theoretical grounding for a more nuanced universalism that does not ascribe to ‘justice-monism’ and builds a ‘negative’ conception of women’s freedom which can be applicable to different social and cultural contexts. This presentation will examine both thinkers’ works and assess the strengths and weaknesses of their views of women’s liberation in the international.

Mitra Shamsi

In recent years, social media platforms have become a battleground for resistance and activism of Iranian women, particularly those whose lifestyle is not represented in the official discourse of the Islamic republic and the mainstream media. Public debates relating to issues of Iranian women are among the dominant discussions on the platforms which have emerged as a parallel public sphere. In this context, my research looks at the mediation of Iranian women’s contestation and debates around gender issues on social media as this is shaped by the historical, socio-political and cultural contexts of the society in general, and the trajectories of the women’s movement in particular. In studying media practices of women’s rights activists, I aim to interrogate the production and construction of the feminist discourses of activists through their strategies of self-mediation on social media. I am particularly interested in how long-standing suppressed collective desires and utopian imaginaries of Iranian women concerning their issues, demands and futures manifest in mediated spaces. I employ an interdisciplinary approach that uses ideas from feminist media studies and political sciences. In the context of the mediation tradition, I rely on the ‘mediation opportunity structure’ as the research theoretical framework. In addition, my project is informed by a variety of concepts, including ‘popular feminism’, ‘media affordances’, and ‘collective desire’. Within the perspective of digital ethnography, I interrogate the complex and multilayered field of the study; the research techniques include participant observation, qualitative text analysis and interviews; discourse analysis is the main qualitative analysis method.

Nehal Elmeligy

In this paper I examine alternative feminist activism and social movements in Egypt by analyzing BuSSy. BuSSy is a performance art group that hosts storytelling workshops and monologues of taboo and “shameful” personal stories that challenge societal and state-sanctioned normative discourses on femininity/womanhood and masculinity/manhood. Drawing on transnational feminist scholarship and queer theory and using collective memory as a lens, I argue that BuSSy’s storytelling is an act of airing Egypt’s dirty laundry, queering normative discourses to enable feminist counter-memorializing. Based on content analysis of secondary data including BuSSy’s published interviews, YouTube videos, website and Facebook images, and testimonies from 2006 to 2020, my analysis reveals BuSSy as curating an “archive of feelings” centralizing gendered narratives of shame. I examine how BuSSy’s affectively contagious storytelling leads to feminist social change by empowering storytellers and listeners. BuSSy’s works create cathartic experiences to shed stigma and shame. Finally, I reconceptualize feminist activism and collective memories outside of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and contribute to the literature on shame by analyzing how BuSSy identifies and counters shame’s silencing power.