Sanctions and Resistance in West Asia
Sanctions and Resistance in West Asia
Date: March 28, 2024
Organizer: Dr Matteo Capasso
Middle East Institute, Columbia University, USA
University of Venice, Italy
This panel explores the role that sanctions regimes have played in both continuing and subverting the racial and economic hierarchies sustaining modern U.S. imperialism, across West Asia. On the one hand, it will focus on sanctions regimes are often deployed to curb alternative models of political and economic development, which, in turn, racially cast those nations who seek to exit the U.S. economic or political sphere as barbarians, rogues, or terrorists. On the other hand, sanctions have backfired. That is, they compelled sanctioned nations to create alternative economic systems, more resilient and effective in managing the impact of economic warfare. Drawing on a variety of cases from the Middle East region, the speakers will reflect on empirical studies, coupled with novel theoretical insights.
PUBLIC EVENT (5PM – 7PM) – ROOM 207
Moderator: Dr Matteo Capasso, Columbia University, US
Speakers:
Dr Eva Nanopolous (on Zoom), Queen Mary University of London, UK
Dr Nina Farnia, Albany Law School, US
Dr Navid Farnia, Wayne State University, US
Dr Manu Karuka, Barnard College, Columbia University, US
About the Speakers:
Matteo Capasso is Marie Curie Global Fellow between Columbia University and University of Venice, Italy. He is the author of Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (2023, Syracuse UP) that reconstructs the last two decades of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, leading up to the 2011 events that sanctioned its fall. His current research focuses on the study of US-led imperialism, the political economy of war, and contemporary Libya.
Navid Farnia is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. His research broadly explores the relationship between racial oppression in the United States and U.S. imperialism. He is currently working on his first book, National Liberation in an Imperialist World: Race, Counterrevolution, and the United States, which traces the U.S. national security state’s evolution by examining how U.S. officials responded to national liberation movements at home and abroad from the 1950s to 1980.
Nina Farna is a legal historian and scholar of Critical Race Theory. She is an Assistant Professor at Albany Law School. Her research examines the development of civil rights, civil procedure, and national security law over the twentieth century. She is especially interested in the impacts of U.S. imperialism on domestic lawmaking. Her scholarship has appeared in a range of academic journals and popular media outlets including Stanford Law Review, UCLA Women’s Law Journal, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the San Francisco Chronicle, and others. Her forthcoming book is entitled Imperialism in the Making of U.S. Law.
Manu Karuka is the author of Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press). He is an assistant professor of American Studies at Barnard College, New York. His work centers a critique of imperialism, with a particular focus on anti-racism and Indigenous decolonization.
Eva Nanopoulos is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of The Juridification of Individual Sanctions and the Politics of EU Law (Hart, 2020), co-editor of The Crisis Behind the Euro-Crisis: The Eurocrisis as a Multidimensional Systemic Crisis of the EU (CUP, 2019) and Capitalist States and Marxist State Theory (Palgrave, 2023) and a member of the editorial collective of the blog Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis and Critique. She is currently working on a new book project, A Decolonial Legal History of Sanctions funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and is more generally interested in the relationship between capitalism, imperialism and international law.