SFM II Launch event: November 18, 2020

The international, CEU based research project Striking from the Margins launched its second phase online on 18th November 2020, 17:00-18:00 CET. The second phase: Striking from the Margins: From Disintegration to Reconstitution of State and Religion in the Middle East, is generously funded by The Carnegie Corporation of New York. 

While the first phase  provided a diagnostic perspective studying the violent transformation of polity, society and religion in the Arab East in recent decades, and since the Arab spring in particular, the second phase of the project pursues simultaneously a diagnostic and prognostic view: It expands its purview to trends emerging from conditions of civil war, marked by unstable balance. It pursues further the reconfiguration of polities, societies and religion, including processes of social engineering accompanying these transformations, both from above and from below. In all this, the issue of reconfiguring gender relations defines a central focus of the project, as the capillary site of major historical change. Some major results of the first phase are available in book form in Striking from the Margins (London, Saqi Books, 2020).

Program:

• Welcome: Prof. J.-L. Fabiani Director of the Center for Religious Studies
• Introduction of the research project: Prof. Al-Azmeh, Prof. Al-Bagdadi

Short research presentations by SFM Fellows

• Dr. Akdedian on Community Resilience and its Limits
• Dr. Zagaria on In-and-out of Exile, Libyan Women’s Political Imaginaries, Employment and Mutual Aid Networks in Tunisia post-2011
• Dr. Dukhan on Devolution of state power in Syria and Iraq: Tribal Auxiliaries in the Margin
• Dr. Al-Jabassini on Local Settlement Agreement in Southern Syria
• Dr. O. Bahadir Dinçer on The mode of operation of de facto regimes in Iraq and Syria

Please find summary and a detailed event program attached.