The ACSS working group, the Beirut Security Studies Collective, will be presenting its work at a panel during the World Social Science Forum (WSSF), which will take place on September 25-28, 2018 at the Fukuoka International Congress Center, Japan.
The panel will take place on Thursday, September 27, 2018 from 16:30 to 18:30 in Room 411.
Titled “Towards a Beirut School of Critical Security Studies,” the panel will introduce the work of the Beirut Security Studies Collective, which aims to critically engage existing academic and policy debates about “security” and international relations of the Arab region, while developing alternative approaches and understandings that focus on the concerns and experiences of scholars and societies within the region, and more broadly, the Global South.
The Collective emanated from a desire to rethink how the notion of security and scholarship within "security studies" is defined and developed. It does so by attempting to draw on better empirical evidence, alternative local narratives, and a more complex picture of the political contexts of insecurity in the Arab region.
The work of the Collective is organized under several themes managed by a network of scholars based in and with ties to the Arab region. The themes are: the political economy of (in)security; the (in) security of everyday life; Technologies of security; Discourses and knowledge production and rethinking global norms and practices.
In contrasting these to the ideas, theories, and assumptions found in the dominant scholarly and policy work found in the US and Northern Europe, this panel offers both a critique of existing approaches as well as tools to build alternative approaches.
Panel speakers will discuss the origins and work of the Beirut Security Studies Collective so far, as well as present individual original papers that reflect the kind of work that the Collective seeks to produce. They are:
Dr. Omar Dahi, Associate Professor of Economics, Hampshire College, USA
Paper Title:“Who Is a Threat to Whom? Climate Change and the Politics of Threat Multipliers in the Syrian Conflict”
Dr. Nicole Grove, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Hawaii Manoa, USA
Paper Title:“Criminality, Simulation, and the Performative Politics of Policing in Dubai”
Dr. Karim Makdisi, Associate Professor of Political Studies, American University of Beirut, Lebanon
Paper Title:“The United Nations: The View from the Arab World”
Dr. Jamil Mouawad, Max Weber Fellow, European University Institute, Italy
Paper Title:“Lebanon’s Border Areas in Light of the Syrian War: New Actors, Old Marginalization”
If you’re attending the Forum, catch the Beirut Security Studies Collective panel to learn more about its work and meet some of its members.
The program of the 2018 World Social Science Forum is available here.