The journal Conflict and Society is celebrating its 10^th year anniversary on the afternoon of Wednesday September 25^th at the University of Amsterdam. Publishing peer-reviewed articles by international scholars, Conflict and Society expands the field of conflict studies by using ethnographic inquiry to establish new fields of research and interdisciplinary collaboration. The journal features general articles devoted to a topic or region, but also sections featuring conceptual debates on key problems in the study of (organized) violence, besides comprehensive reviews of new books.

The event will include a keynote by Dr. Munira Khayyat, and two panels that discuss the impact and role of the journal in the field of conflict studies, and the state of conflict studies in anthropology in the Netherlands.

NB! The keynote will take place in REC C0.01, and for the subsequent panel discussions and drinks we will be in CREA Muziekzaal.

Please register using the link provided.

Keynote lecture by Dr. Munira Khayyat

The fire next time: living through seasonal conflagration in South Lebanon

South Lebanon has existed in a condition of war for decades. The inhabitants of this agricultural borderland and frontline region have continued to live off the land through seasons of conflagration. The landscape is a Mediterranean maquis, an anthropogenic, arid terrain, that has, through millennia, adapted to seasonal brushfires – and, in more recent times, to the scorched earth tactics of asymmetrical warfare. In this talk I look at the convergence of nature and necropolitics in South Lebanon through a foray into the resistant ecologies that have taken shape in this war-seasoned region where minefields and white phosphorous are among the ordinary challenges facing farmers today. What can we learn from those who must factor in the end of the world while pursuing their livelihoods?

About the speaker

Munira Khayyat is an anthropologist whose research revolves around life in war, intimate genealogies of empire, and theory from the South. Her first book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (University of California Press 2022) examines resistant ecologies in a world of perennial warfare. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in frontline villages along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, she examines war not only as a place of death and destruction, but also necessarily, as an environment of living.

Khayyat’s research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, the Rachel Carson Center. Her writing has appeared in American Ethnologist, Public Culture, JMEWS, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology News, HAU, and a number of edited volumes. Khayyat was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2018-2019). Before joining NYUAD, she taught at the American University in Cairo (2013-2023) and the American University of Beirut (2011-2013). She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University (2013), an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University (1998) and a BA in history (1997) from the American University of Beirut.