The Urban and Local Dimensions of Political Violence in Syria and the Middle East
Call for Papers and Workshop Announcement
The Syria Urban Research Project (SUR Project), a group of Arab researchers working on related questions in Syria and the Middle East, with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the American Political Science Association (APSA), and in collaboration with the Civilization Forum 2023 of The Alliance of Civilizations Institute (MEDIT) at Ibn Haldun University (Istanbul) and the Beirut Urban Lab (BUL) at the American University of Beirut is organizing a three-day interdisciplinary—and dataset-focused—workshop titled
The Urban and Local Dimensions of Political Violence in Syria and the Middle East
Date: October 27 – 29, 2023
Location: MEDIT’s campus, Süleymaniye, Istanbul
The workshop seeks to understand how political violence becomes “urbanized” and transformed within cities in the Middle East. It also aims to convene postgraduate students and young scholars employing georeferenced datasets in any country in the Middle East on the subject. It also aims to convene postgraduate students and young scholars employing georeferenced datasets in any country in the Middle East on the subject.
Presenters will be able to attend and benefit from sessions in both events, as well as a half-day training module on mapping and visualization skills and methodological approaches to socio-spatial analysis, organized by BUL and presented by Ahmad Gharbieh, Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the American University of Beirut and co-director at BUL.
This call for papers seeks to centralize dense networks, as a research subject and approach, and the creative use/collection of datasets in urban and spatial analysis. Special attention is also given to the relational approach to local dynamics in the examination of political violence and contentious politics, as opposed to typical macro-themes of urban politics. For datasets, specifically in the case of codification, the spatial turn in Middle East-related scholarship is yet to integrate georeferenced projects in ways that allow for answering cross-cutting theoretical questions.
Interested graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career scholars are invited to submit 300-400-word abstracts by July 1 using the application form. Applicants interested in conducting quantitative research without already having a dataset are welcome to contact the organizing committee ahead of the submission deadline, ideally by June 20, to discuss the possibility of accessing existing datasets on geocoded protest data, urban data (e.g. property, facilities, infrastructure), physical destruction, and more.
For more information and to submit papers, kindly visit SUR Project's website.