CANCELLED: Israel and the Internationalization of Citizenship Restrictions

Dr Shourideh C. Molavi (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies)

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED

The past few decades have revealed the advancement of efforts by  Western democratic states to delimit their national identities, moral  frontiers and territorial borders against the ‘unwanted’ or  ‘undesirable’. These initiatives include the broadening and  intensification of various intra-national and trans-national techniques  of restriction, expulsion, revocation and containment. This tightening  and redrawing of the boundaries of inclusion by sovereign power has  taken shape, insofar as it has succeeded, through the active application  of the principles, tools and discourse of citizenship. Yet, while  directed toward the presence and migration of unwanted, undesirable and  unknown populations, these efforts by Western democracies have largely  resulted in the fortification of citizenship restrictions. In other  worlds, the multifaceted endeavor to reallocate and reconstitute  political subjects to their preferred sovereigns has, in the process, re-incorporated the figure of the citizen into the body politic. Against  this backdrop, I argue that the recent and ongoing un-rooting, re-framing and the rise of new actors and acts of citizenship to reveal  the ways the relation of exclusion is being internalized; shifting the gaze of exclusion onto the figure of the citizen. Using the Israeli incorporation regime as an analytical and political paradigm, in this  study I point extensively to a political trajectory where the figure of  the ‘citizen’ is being vested with features of the less stable and  capricious ‘immigrant’ in the body politic.

About the speaker

Shourideh C. Molavi is Assistant Professor in Political Science and International Relations at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar. For  the past fourteen years she has worked with numerous civil society groups of the Palestinian community in Gaza City, Nablus, Jerusalem, Haifa,  Ramallah and Bethlehem. Much of this work has been with Arab citizens of Israel and Haifa-based NGOs, including Mada al Carmel: Arab Center for Applied Social Research and Adalah: Legal Center for Arab  Minority Rights. Shourideh is also author ofStateless Citizenship: The Palestinian Citizens of Israel (Brill, 2013).

Organiser: Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies

Contact email: cb92@soas.ac.uk