Abstract:

In July and August, hostilities in the Gaza Strip left 2,131 Palestinians and 71 Israelis dead, including 501 Palestinian children and one Israeli child. Of Gaza’s 1.8 million residents, 475,000 are living in temporary shelters or with other families because their homes have been severely damaged. The extent of destruction has raised questions around culpability for war crimes on all sides of the conflict. International organizations including the United Nations Human Rights Council, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called for independent investigation. At the end of 2014, Palestine deposited a 12(3) application to the ICC for ad-hoc jurisdiction as well as acceded to the Rome Statute, thus granting the International Criminal Court the authority to investigate war crimes conducted in Palestinian territory. Such an investigation would bring both Israel and Palestine under scrutiny for events from this summer and as far back as 2012, and possibly to 2002 when the ICC was first formed to investigate war crimes. This is the third large scale military offensive against the besieged coastal enclave since Israel’s unilateral disengagement in 2005. Given the shortcomings of the ceasefire on August 26, 2014, another attack is seemingly inevitable. How is such civilian carnage possible notwithstanding the humanitarian and human rights legal regimes established to reduce civilian suffering? And what are the prospects for accountability under international criminal law and beyond? This lecture will explore these questions and specifically the prospects for accountability at the ICC. 

Speaker Bio:

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Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney, activist, and an Assistant Professor at George Mason University. Her scholarship investigates the laws of war, human rights, refugee law, and national security. She is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya, an electronic magazine that leverages scholarly expertise and local knowledge on the Middle East. She has taught International Human Rights Law and the Middle East at Georgetown University since Spring 2009 and before beginning at George Mason University, she was a Freedman Teaching Fellow at Temple University, Beasley School of Law. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, chaired by Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich. She helped to initiate and organize several national formations including Arab Women Arising for Justice (AMWAJ) and the U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN). While an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, Noura helped launch the first university divestment campaign at UC Berkeley in 2001 and upon graduating from Berkeley Law School, she helped seed BDS campaigns throughout the country uas the National Organizer with the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. There, she also helped initiate federal lawsuits in the U.S. against Israeli officials in for war crimes and crimes against humanity. She has lived and worked throughout the Middle East including as part of a legal fact-finding delegation to the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of Israel’s Winter 2008/09 onslaught and spent the Spring 2010 academic semester in Beirut, Lebanon as a Visiting Scholar at the American University in Beirut.  Noura has appeared on PBS News Hour, BBC World Service, NPR’s “To The Point,” MSNBC's "Up With Chris Hayes," Fox’s “The O’ Reilly Factor,” NBC’s “Politically Incorrect,” Democracy Now, and Al-Jazeera Arabic and English. Her non-scholarly publications have appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, Huffington Post, and Foreign Policy among others.  Most recently, she co-published an anthology entitled Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures. 

This event is co-sponsored by the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

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Abstract

This study evaluates the effects of election observers (EOs) on local beliefs about the credibility of elections. It examines those effects using an innovative research design implemented in Tunisia during the 2014 election cycle. A two-wave panel study contains experiments that convey information to randomly selected respondents about the nationality of EOs and their evaluations of the elections. It leverages the unique timing of Tunisia’s elections – two general elections separated by just one month – to investigate how election monitoring and beliefs about election credibility in one election affect political behaviors around future elections. In addition to advancing the literature on the effects of election observation and democracy promotion more generally, the findings from this research contribute to a growing body of work on election credibility, which scholars posit is an important determinant of a number of political behaviors from democratic engagement and voter turnout to protest and election violence.
 

Speaker Bio

Lauren Prather

Abstract:

Islamic charities occupied a critical space in Mubarak-era Egypt. While there are a plethora of organizational types and activities, Mona Atia describes a particular type of work performed by Islamic charities as a merging of religious and capitalist subjectivity, or pious neoliberalism. Pious neoliberalism describes how Islamism works in conjunction with neoliberalism rather than as an alternative to it. It represents a new compatibility between business and piety that is not specific to any religion, but rather is a result of the ways in which religion and economy interact in the contemporary moment. In Egypt, pious neoliberalism produces new institutions, systems of knowledge production and subjectivities. This lecture explores the relationship between Islamic charity and Egypt’s variegated religious landscape. The author will discuss how Islamic charities helped spread Islamic practices outside the space of the mosque and into everyday life/spaces and their impact on development in Egypt.

Speaker Bio:

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Mona Atia is Associate Professor of Geography and International Affairs at the George Washington University. She received her PhD in Geography at the University of Washington, where she received the 2008 Distinguished Dissertation Award. She holds a MSc in Cities, Space and Society from the London School of Economics and a BS in Business Administration from the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Atia is a critical development geographer whose areas of expertise include Islamic charity and finance, philanthropy and humanitarianism, and the production of poverty knowledge. She is author of Building a House in Heaven: Pious Neoliberalism and Islamic Charity in Egypt (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). She currently holds an NSF CAREER Award for her project "The Impact of Poverty Mapping on the Geography of Development."

This event is co-sponsored by the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

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China has a relatively weak primary healthcare system as well as the highest absolute disease burden of diabetes in the world, accounting for almost one in three diabetes patients globally. An estimated 74.2% of the 114 million Chinese patients with diabetes are untreated. Extending treatment will add a heavy burden on the health care system. As the most developed Chinese city that spends a modest 5.1% GDP on health with excellent outcomes, Hong Kong may serve as a cost-effective model for strengthening primary  care for chronic disease management, with diabetes care as an example.

In this seminar, Professor Leung will discuss the health system in Hong Kong, the importance of primary care, and recent research assessing the ‘value for money’ of care for all 631,469 patients with diabetes who attended the public sector in Hong Kong between 2006 and 2013.  He argues that the publicly funded and provided integrated model of Hong Kong may serve as a useful value-for-money reference as mainland China scales up to address the national epidemic of chronic disease like diabetes.  

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Leung specialises in the field of public health medicine, a statutorily accredited specialty that covers the full range of public health sciences and their constituent disciplines.

Within the broad scope of public health medicine, his major interests revolve around topics that 1) have major population health impact locally, 2) where Hong Kong is a reliable and unique epidemiologic sentinel for mainland China, or 3) where Hong Kong is particularly endowed and best placed to address the fundamental science at hand. As such his research crosses the traditional boundaries of individual disciplines or fields of enquiry.