Upcoming events

Next week I'll be presenting on poverty reduction and elimination in Brazil in London.  I'm booked to present at the Institute for the Study of the Americas on Tuesday (28) and at a symposium organised by Middlesex University in Trafalgar Square on Wednesday (29).  That said, I have no idea how long I will be able to present for - I'm still waiting to hear back!

Anyway, this should hopefully be an interesting exercise and pay-off for the last few weeks.  I've been giving up my Fridays and Sundays to prepare this work and have become quite interested in the topic.  Maybe I can develop it further after the events into a possible journal article.  The subject is also complementing other work I'm doing on participation and grassroots development among Palestinians.  I find that reading on one helps the other.  After next week's events I aim to post a summary of what I said and the response to it.

Brazil under Dilma

My latest reflections on Brazil and its foreign policy are now up at the Ideas blog.  I haven’t written there for awhile so it was about time that I did so.  It was only after I sent it in that I realised I had written something else of Brazilian foreign policy, only a few months earlier and based on the workshop we had at the LSE in the summer.  So the next Latin America-related piece that I draft will have to focus on another country.  When that will be, I don’t know.  The year is not even a month old and already things seem so busy.

That said, I have begun to make a start on a paper that I’ve had in mind to write for awhile.  This week I finished the last interview needed to make a start on it, which considers Brazil’s and Venezuela’s contrasting approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  I won’t say any more about it at the moment, other than that I aim to get a first draft done to present at the Ideas Centre (if they’ll have me!) in early April.  Also around that time a couple of journal articles are due to come out, the proofs of which I’m currently checking.

Journal uncertainty

I’m coming to the conclusion that academic journals are like London buses: you wait ages for one to reply to your submitted article and several all reply at the same time.  So it has happened in the past couple of weeks when several journals sent decisions on papers I submitted, one from last month, another in July and two others after I made the changes requested by the reviewers – in one case two years ago.

So it seems that two of them may soon be published, while in responding to the third I am no clearer to knowing if they will publish it (since they didn’t express any urgency about when I might make the changes) and the fourth will require more work.  Anyway, what this all suggests is that the Christmas-New Year period may not be as calm as I like, since I will need to do some work on these papers.  Still, it’ll be nice to boost my publications total and actually see them in print (fingers crossed – can’t get too confident since I've been waiting for at least one to be printed for over a year now!).

Thoughts on Brazil's development model - shared in public

It was a flying visit back to London at the weekend for the Latin America 2011 conference.  This is an annual event organised by the various solidarity groups and bringing together activists and academics.  I had been invited to present on the Brazil panel, along with Joaobe Cavalcanti (an Anglican priest based in London who is also the Workers Party representative) and Francisco Dominguez of Middlesex University.

I was invited through my involvement with the LSE Ideas Centre and the conference I presented at back in July.  I guess they didn’t realise at the time what making an invitation to me would mean.  But I didn’t feel I could say no: I’ve never been invited to present at a conference before and it’s good to keep my foot in the door on Latin America-related activity, including in the UK.  There was also the matter of the launch for the Right Wing Politics in the New Latin America book, which I contributed a chapter on (it now seems so long ago – the paper I presented at the Society of Latin American Studies conference in Leeds in April 2009 which was the genesis for the chapter and finally sending it to Steve Ludlam, one of the editors, back in July last year).

Water as resistance

There seems to be a general thread across different aspects of the Palestinian ‘development’ domain. This was brought home to me at yesterday’s workshop, hosted by Birzeit’s International Studies department, on water resources and management. There were a couple of interesting presentations about the situation facing the Palestinians. Indeed the most interesting were those that had a political edge and which, in the words of the rapporteur, focused on how to break the constraints posed by the occupation as opposed to working within them (the latter was addressed in a couple of presentations on intergrated water resources management and the waste water strategy).

Todos somos palestinos

Last night a friend was showing me the video she was making of the rallies in support of the Palestinian Authority (PA) president Abu Mazen's homecoming following his speech at the UN. It was full of people waving Palestinian flags and posters of the leader himself.  Many of them were wearing the black and white checkered Palestinian scarf known as the keffiyeh.

Then this morning, I was checking out a friend's blog about life on the other side of the world. Being here it's easy to forget that there are other events happening elsewhere, making similar demands for change.  So thanks, Robert, for reminding me of Chile and the efforts being made there to achieve free and fair education.

What is striking is the link between these two political struggles in the simple form of the keffiyeh, no longer a symbol of only Palestinian national identity, but of global social activism:

Some reflections on gender

At the moment I'm preparing a presentation for a workshop and the launch of a report on gender equality and development which we're hosting with the World Bank next week.  This should be interesting and details of the findings that my colleagues worked on at the beginning of the year make for interesting findings.  Granted, the fieldwork was collected in Rafah (Gaza) and Hebron, perhaps the most socially conservative part of the West Bank.  But both have to reflect Palestinian society to some degree.

Looking to New York

You would have to have been locked away in solitary confinement not to know that this week is when the Palestinian state juggernaut goes to the UN and seeks international recognition of the fact.  Walking across Clock Square (or is it now Arafat Square?) my friends and I came across the work team putting up a stage and sound system.  Palestinian flags made up the bunting between the lampposts while in Al Manara Square a few minutes’ walk away a giant blue and white chair to symbolise Palestine’s seat at the UN has been put in place (I intend to get a photo of me sitting on it, which will make me look tiny - UPDATE: That wasn't - and as of today - 9 October - still isn't possible as there always seem to be police around it!).  Meanwhile, the university president sent a circular to all staff this afternoon announcing that anyone who wants to can go attend the demonstration and speeches between 11am and 2pm.

 

Palestinian politics, unity and the role of religion

I attended the first day of Muwatin’s (the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy) two-day conference on the Arab revolutions and the political and intellectual challenges stemming from them yesterday.  I won’t be able to get to today’s presentations as I have other commitments.  Although the quality of the presentations and discussion was variable, it did present some useful insights and thoughts to consider.

First, I get the sense that there is very much a sense of disconnection from Palestinian society and the leadership.  The focus of the past few months (in case it’s escaped anyone’s attention!) has been on the Palestinian leadership’s drive to achieve recognition for a Palestinian state at the UN next week.  The last couple of weeks have seen reports coming out in the media which have raised a number of concerns in relation to this move, including the status of refugees who would be forgotten if the PLO’s status (which represents Palestinians everywhere, including in the diaspora) is revoked in favour of the PA.  There’s also the question of how to incorporate Gaza and East Jerusalem into the Palestinian state vote as well.