Conference Call for Papers

Research on the history of solidarity movements with Palestinians is flourishing. Numerous studies have analyzed the specific contexts, alliances, and motives that moved contemporaries to express their support of Palestinians in such different places as the United States, Argentina, Belgium, and Pakistan.[1] Most of them hailed from Marxist-Leninist currents and intersected with broader Third-Worldist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist revolutionary agendas. Many included Palestinian and other Arab residents. New research not only adds more cases to this worldwide panorama, but also raises the question of how these different solidarity movements shaped each other and interacted with a global Palestinian diaspora, adding to the general globalization of the Palestinian cause.[2]

In order to provide an answer to this question, this workshop will bring together scholars working on solidarity movements with Palestinians in different countries, and on the Palestinian archive of international cooperation. The workshop seeks to overcome nationally compartmentalized perspectives and foster a conversation about the transnational currents and global dynamics that underpinned the ebbs and flows of solidarity movements with Palestinians around the world. Solidarity took many forms, ranging from intellectual, poetic, political, cultural, and personal contributions, engagements, friendships, and strategic alliances. Building on recent studies, the workshop will especially look at the history of solidarity movements in conversation with developments in Middle Eastern and Palestinian history.[3] In global as well as regional research on Palestine solidarity, there is still a need to complement the dominant trend of writing diplomatic histories of political movements and state actors with a bottom up approach.

We invite contributions from scholars at all career stages working on solidarity movements with Palestinians between the 1950s and the 1980s. While the decades indicated provide a loose time frame, it will be one of the aims of the workshop to discuss diverging periodizations and consider the import of such key moments as the Bandung Conference (1955), the Tricontinental Conference (1966), the Six-Day War (1967), the attack on the Munich Olympics (1972), the expulsion of the PLO from Beirut (1982), or the beginning of the First Intifada (1987). We especially encourage scholars working on solidarity movements with Palestinians in African, South Asian, Eastern European, and East Asian countries to submit contributions. We privilege research based on source material in the relevant language(s) of the case countries preferably in conversation with Palestinian historiography.

Proposals for papers should include a 300-word abstract and a brief 100-word biography with contact information. Participants of the workshop will be asked to submit papers of approximately 4,000 words three weeks before the workshop date. Papers will be pre-circulated among the participants and discussed at the workshop. Funding for travel and accommodation will be provided. Proposals should be emailed to globalhistoryworkshop@gmail.com no later than June 6, 2021.

[1] Michael R. Fischbach, Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018); Shahab Ahmad, “The Poetics of Solidarity: Palestine in Modern Urdu Poetry,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 18 (1998): 29-64; John Nieuwenhuys, “La cause palestinienne en Belgique : enjeux d’une histoire par le bas,” Contemporanea 39 (2017): n.p.; Jessica Stites Mor, “The Question of Palestine in the Argentine Political Imaginary: Anti-Imperialist Thought from Cold War to Neoliberal Order,” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 20 (2014): 183-197.

[2] See, for instance the project Entangled Histories of Palestine and the Global New Left at Roskilde University: https://forskning.ruc.dk/en/projects/entangled-histories-of-palestine-and-the-global-new-left-1967-198; and the Palestinian Revolution project: http://learnpalestine.politics.ox.ac.uk/

[3] Maha Nassar, Brothers Apart Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017); Yoav Di-Capua, “Palestine Comes to Paris: The Global Sixties and the Making of a Universal Cause,” Journal of Palestine Studies (2021).