Category Archives: Blog
Omid Mehrgan: Palestine the Wound: A Report on the Iranian Reception of the Cause
A Postscript Note: I finished writing this piece prior to the Israeli-US attacks on Iranian cities and nuclear facilities, which killed over a thousand people. There is, therefore, no trace of that consequential war in the piece. Another event also took place between the time of writing this and the onset of that war: the […]
Aaron F. Eldridge: The Palestinian Cause Contra Sectarian Thinking
“History is what hurts,” stated Frederic Jameson; “it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis” (1982, 102). And the situation today in Lebanon is a painful one, indeed. For many, the settler-colonial Zionist efforts to bring about the total obliteration of Palestine and the invasion and bombing […]
Nico Putz: On Anti-Deutsche and Neo-Imperial War
This forum has shed light on vastly different but interrelated contexts of Palestine solidarity. The essays draw attention to the interplay of shifting solidarities with Palestine and the amorphous formation of “the (political) left” across geographical and temporal contexts. Germany, although not belonging to the postcolonial and neocolonial contexts as in the other essays, is […]
Olivia C. Harrison: Who’s Afraid of Palestine Solidarity?
One question has been haunting me since the current wave of repression of pro-Palestinian speech began in the wake of the October 7 attacks and the genocidal campaign-disguised-as-reprisal that followed: who’s afraid of Palestine solidarity? This is an urgent question on US, French, and German campuses today, but its purview is not limited to the […]
Arpan Roy: Introduction: Staying-With Palestine. Making and Remaking Postcolonial Worlds
Extrajudicial arrest, termination from employment, suspension of university enrollment, being declared persona non-grata (Karl 2025), police violence at demonstrations, harassment at airports, online doxxing, and, in the case of six-year old Wadea al-Fayoume, a martyrdom in a strange land—these are some of the ways in which solidarity with Palestine has, since October 2023, been rebuked […]
Jason Hickel, Don Kalb, Maria Dyveke Styve, and Federico Tomasone: Reorganize Production to Serve Life, Not Profit
On 15 May 2025, Jason Hickel – economic anthropologist, leading degrowth theorist and author of popular works such as The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions and Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World – delivered a provocative lectio magistralis as the Third Annual Global Research Programme on Inequality […]
Marc Edelman: This Year in the United States, Flag Day Is No Kings Day
From large cities to small towns, “No Kings Day” will counter Trump’s birthday spectacle with people power. “Nah, he wouldn’t really do that.” I’ve lived in the Upper Delaware Valley for five years, first in Pike County, Pennsylvania, and now in Sullivan County, New York. My county went 58% for Trump last November, and several […]
Sindre Bangstad: The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism and Academic Freedom
Cancelling Mbembe On June 6 2024 I was present in the grand hall that is the University Aula of the University of Bergen in Norway when my friend Achille Mbembe received the prestigious Holberg Prize from the University of Bergen (UiB). I had been there in the same hall when Mbembe, arguably the most widely […]
Anna Balazs: War, displacement, and cultural heritage: reflections on a workshop
“On the form, I ticked that I had got enough pads. I ticked that I had been instructed. I ticked that I had applied for microloans, more than once. I ticked that I had been encouraged. I ticked that I had nowhere to live. I ticked that I had nowhere to study. I ticked that […]
Chris Hann: Humiliation, Hubris and Hamartia: the emotional history of the Ukraine war
Introduction Soon after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in an earlier post on this blog (Hann 2022), I emphasized the geopolitical and economic interests of the west, especially US corporations. I extended my analysis in 2024 in the Focaal journal itself (Hann 2024a; 2024b), where my article benefited from the critical insights of Denys Gorbach […]