Description:

The year 2020 has brought about global insecurity in unprecedented and inexplicable ways. This panel will take the Arab World, primarily Syria and Lebanon, as a place from which to think about insecurity and crisis. How are these lived? What does it mean to be living-in-crisis and with constant insecurity? How do people imagine their futures when their present is incommensurable? In this panel, Samer Abboud and Sami Hermez will think through the possibilities for transformative change to bring about collective security. They will also examine how this change is limited by forms of regional and international intervention into the different conflicts that serve to perpetuate, rather than alleviate, insecurity.

Speakers: 

Samer Abboud is Associate Professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University and the author of Syria (Polity, 2018). 

Sami Hermez is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Acting Director of the Liberal Arts Program at Northwestern University in Qatar. He is the author of War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (2017) and currently completing a manuscript, Sireen: A Palestinian Story of Dispossession and Resistance, under contract with Stanford University Press. His research lies at the intersection of violence, affect, and temporality, and their entanglements in everyday life. 

Abboud and Hermez work in collaboration as part of the Beirut School of Critical Security Studies, a working group organized by The Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS).

This webinar is free and open to the public.

This webinar will be available through WebEx at this LINK. Please use the following passcode when accessing: 1234. The talk will begin at 12 p.m. CDT on Tuesday, October 20.

This is part of the Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs’ Building Sustainable Futures: Global Challenges and Possibilities webinar series.