Middle East Studies

Conference ─ Partitions: A Global Perspective

Event poster

Friday, November 22 –
Saturday, November 23, 2019

McKinney Conference Room, 111 Thayer Street

This conference is open to Brown University faculty and students only.   Registration is required.  Please register here.

This is the seventh event of the multi-year project on Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples, directed by Omer Bartov at the Watson Institute.

The overall scholarly objective of this workshop is to initiate an interdisciplinary academic dialogue between established and junior scholars who study partition from different angles. More specifically, the dual aims of the workshop are, first to read politics of separation and partition in a historical context and, second, to locate the history of partition in Palestine in a global, comparative perspective.

Panelists will examine the genesis of the idea of partition, the way it emerged as a political "solution" across widely divergent territories, the legal and political language that was used to codify and justify it, and the methods by which the theory of partition was executed and made into practice. Discussions will also examine reactions to or artistic representations of partition.

Israel

Schedule

Thursday, November 21, 2019

4:00 Book event with Eric Weitz, Joukowsky Forum

A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation States

Friday, November 22, 2019

8:30 Welcome/Opening Remarks/Introductions-Omer Bartov & Arie Dubnov

9:00 Session 1:

Political spaces: Borders, Empires and Nations in Twentieth-Century International Thought
Or Rosenboim

Partition and the Settler-Colonial Question: Sovereignty and Indigeneity in the Post-1945 Global Order

Laura Robson

11:00 Session 2:

Revisiting the origins of Irish partition (1880-1920): Means and Ends

Alvin Jackson

Rwanda and Burundi, the UN, and Belgium: When Is (or Is Not) a Partition a Partition

Eric Weitz

2:00 Session 3:

The Partition before the 1947 Partition: Palestinian Statelessness and Zionist State Making from the 1920s

Alon Confino

From Parity to Partition: Palestinian Demography, International Politics and the 1937 Partition Plan

Nimrod Lin

4:00 Session 4:

Civil War, Total War, or a War of Partition? Reassessing the 1948 War in Palestine from a Global Perspective

Arie Dubnov

Saturday, November 23, 2019

8:30 Session 5:

The Partitions of India

Steve Wilkinson

Beyond Partition? States, Citizens and the Boundaries of Belonging in Post-1947 South Asia

Sarah Ansari

10:30 Session 6:

An Unfinished Divide: Partitioning the Lahore Museum

Aparna Kumar

Identifying partitions beyond Ireland, India, and Palestine: is there anything we can learn from the history of international law?

Victor Matthew Kattan