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A Social History of Red Internationalism in post-1967 Arab world

Project description

The untold story of Arab revolutionary movements

The 1967 Arab defeat in the war against Israel, known as the Naksa, is often seen as the end of revolutionary hope in the region. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the SoHRI67 project tells a different story. It explores Red Internationalism – Marxist-Leninist and Third-Worldist movements – in the Arab world during the long 1960s. Focusing on Lebanon and the Gulf, the project investigates how a new generation of Arab activists turned socialism and anti-imperialism into concrete political action. By emphasising social history and grassroots experiences, SoHRI67 challenges conventional narratives and highlights the Global South as a vital source of original political thought and practice during this period.

Objective

SoHRI67 retrieves the unexplored social history of Red Internationalism (i.e.: internationalism informed by Marxism-Leninism and Third-Worldism) in the Arab Region during the long-1960s. It approaches internationalism as both ideological framing for action and militant political practice, to explore the transformative power of the new normative commitment to socialism and anti-imperialism matured by a new generation of Arab radicals in the wake of the Arab defeat of the 1967 war against Israel (the so-called Naksa). It focuses on the inter-Arab dimension of internationalism, to overcome – in the words of Bardawil – «the colonial divide assigning the Global South as locus of “concrete facts” and the North the manufacturer of “abstract theory», and re-cognize the South as site of original militant theorization. It specifically centers on the Lebanese-Gulf trajectory, to challenge the canonical historiographical representation of the Naksa as the inexorable end of the Arab revolutionary hopes unleashed by independence and decolonization, and retrieve, instead, its underexplored generative impact on the grammars, practices, and agendas of emancipatory political action. It adopts the vantage point of social history to move away from de-materialized, diffusionist, top-down approaches to the study of political theory and practice and relocate the latter’s genealogies, developments, and articulations in the lived experiences, contingent urgencies, and aspirations of the people who elaborated and embodied it. In so doing, it breaks new ground to: a) expand the knowledge of the Arab secular radical political traditions, b) further scale up the historical rethinking of the Naksa; c) further enlarge the understanding and recognition of the role of subaltern actors as agents of change in the Arab region; d) provide new empirical and theoretical-methodological instruments for the study of popular politics; e) add-up to the entangled, revolutionary geographies of the Global 1960s

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI ROMA LA SAPIENZA
Net EU contribution
€ 320 510,76
Address
Piazzale Aldo Moro 5
00185 Roma
Italy
Region
Centro (IT) Lazio Roma
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
No data

Partners (3)