13 October, Online: The Resistance Front and the New Global Order-Making

About this Event

On September 17th, Israel launched an indiscriminate and disproportionate attack against Lebanon, triggering pager devices to detonate, which resulted in thousands of injuries and several fatalities, including the killing of a 10-year-old Lebanese girl. This attack has been preceded by an earlier escalation on July 31st, just one week after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the U.S. Congress. During that escalation, Israel further intensified the ongoing genocide by assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, in Tehran. This assassination, a blatant violation of Iranian sovereignty under international law, has further destabilized West Asia and propelled the struggle for liberation in the Arab-Iranian region against Zionist-imperialist aggression into a new phase, heightening the potential for a significant response from Iran.

Iran’s top political and military leaders have declared that their ‘blood revenge’ for Haniyeh’s assassination—who was on a diplomatic mission to attend Iran’s presidential inauguration—while inherently defensive, will be far more severe than the response to the April attack. In that instance, Iran had launched more than 300 missiles and drones directly at Israel in an act of self-defense in response to Israel’s earlier bombing of Iran’s diplomatic mission in Damascus on April 1. This unprecedented move altered the strategic balance in the region.

The response of the Resistance Front to recent Zionist aggressions could mark a pivotal moment, potentially with significant geopolitical and economic implications for order-making in a region where public opinion is reaching a boiling point, and the political backlash against Israel’s actions and U.S. support for its regime is growing to an unprecedented level.

In this panel, we discuss the evolving dimensions of the recent escalation in the region. The discussion will contextualize these developments within the broader shifts in global power dynamics, drawing on legal and geopolitical economic perspectives.

Speakers

Foad Izadi is a professor of American Studies at the Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran. He is a Member of the Board of Directors of World BEYOND War. He is based in Iran. Izadi’s research and teaching interests are interdisciplinary and focus on United States-Iran relations and U.S. public diplomacy. His book, United States Public Diplomacy Towards Iran, discusses the United States communication efforts in Iran during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. Izadi has published numerous studies in national and international academic journals and major handbooks, including: Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy and Edward Elgar Handbook of Cultural Security.

Nazanin Zarepour is a PhD student of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, and holds a Master’s in Political Theory with a collaborative specialization in Critical Development Studies from the University of Toronto. Their interdisciplinary research is interested in locating novel political solutions to the crisis of modernity from the global subaltern. Their research centres the intellectual and cultural histories of West Asia that displace and critique the hegemonic assumptions of modernity, emphasizing the importance of non-material, non-rational factors as central to the ‘good life.’ Nazanin is especially interested in liberation theologies emerging from West Asia – particularly ideologues of the Iranian Revolution and beyond with an emphasis on employing the works of Ali Shari’ati as a method for cross-cultural political theorizing. Their research is interested in both the theoretical (how these ideas offer answers to normative questions), and the practical (how these ideas come to life in anti-colonial resistance) – the latter of which they explore through visual and print cultures. Alongside their academic work, Nazanin is a text-based artist, writer, and Editor-in-Chief of critical literary magazine The Vermin.

Taha Zeinali is a researcher at the University of Kassel, Germany, with a focus on Critical International Political Economy and Development Studies. His research interests include the political economy of imperialist encroachment in West Asia, the intersection of sanctions and neoliberalism, and strategies for developing economic resilience under these conditions, and potential alternative modes of integration of Iran’s economy into the global market. His current research involves a conjunctural analysis of the political realignment within the Iranian state during the 2010s, examining its relationship with the sanction regime and other aspects of imperialist hybrid war.

Helyeh Doutaghi is a scholar of international law. Her research explores the intersections of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), encompassing postcolonial critiques of law, sanctions, and international political economy. Additionally, she is interested in International Humanitarian Law (IHL), having written about its history, practice, and the production of knowledge (and ignorance), particularly in the context of the US military. Before completing her doctoral studies in law and legal studies, Helyeh obtained her LLM in Transnational Law from King’s College London and her BA Honors in Law, with a minor in Political Science, at Carleton University. Most recently, she was the co-chair of the International People’s Tribunal on US Imperialism.

Khaled Barakat is a Palestinian writer and member of the Executive Committee of the Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement

Radhika Desai, Moderator is Professor in the Department of Political Studies and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba, Canada, and Convenor of the International Manifesto Group.

Organizers

This webinar is organized by the International Manifesto Group and Helyeh Doutaghi.

Sponsors

International Manifesto Group, Samidoun and Masar Badil

Please register and share widely!