Sept. 9 - Nakba and Law
CPS faculty members and our visiting partners from Adalah, the Haifa-based Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, met privately to review their joint “Nakba and Law” Project, initiated the previous spring. The basic analytic intervention of the new project is to examine the legal dimensions of the Nakba, the “catastrophe,” a term that conventionally refers to the historical events of 1948, but we view as consisting of a complex set of enduring structures and continuing processes. After several years of active collaborations between CPS and Adalah, the formulation of this project represented a major new step.
We drafted a successful project proposal for a grant funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (WOTRO Science for Global Development). The grant monies provided for the creation of a professional blog and for a concluding project workshop. “The Nakba Files,” the blog launched in May 2016, has exceeded all expectations in its overall excellence and in the coverage and novel analyses of its posts, which have been written by legal scholars, critical theorists and lawyers. It has opened a vital new space for thought and discussion and it has attracted numerous visitors. The concluding workshop would represent a first for CPS: an event held in Palestine. (See below, Dec. 7-8)
