PROGRAMME
ABSTRACTS AND SPEAKERS
Day 1 SESSION 1
Dr. Paris Yeros (Professor of International Relation and World Political Economy, Federal University of ABC, São Paulo, Brazil and Editor of Agrarian South)
Sovereignty and Solidarity 70 Years After Bandung
It is impossible to think about the present without considering the emergence of the Third World that began in Bandung and the search for unity among oppressed peoples. It is urgent that we renew our reflection on the meaning of Bandung. Generalized decolonization ushered in by Bandung is not a story of the distant past. It is our contemporary history, and its strength is far from exhausted. It is worth remembering that the liberation movements were the driving force behind the systemic rivalry of the Cold War, which resulted in the globalization of the system of national sovereignty and remains today the concrete basis of the struggles for a better world and the measure of the direction of world politics. The course that the Third World will take in the twenty-first century will determine whether imperialism and its barbarity will prevail or whether the path will be consolidated towards popular sovereignty, peaceful coexistence and the transition to socialism. The struggle for the liberation of Palestine and the genocide committed by imperialism and Zionism demonstrate once again that, whatever the configuration of the “great powers”, the main contradiction remains between imperialism and the working people of the Third World.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Paris Yeros is Professor at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC, São Paulo, Brazil) in the faculties of Economic Sciences and Sciences & Humanities and in the postgraduate program in World Political Economy. He is a member of the Nucleus of African and Afro-Brazilian Studies (NEAB-UFABC), research associate of the Sam Moyo African Institute for Agrarian Studies (Zimbabwe), and an editor of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy (Sage-India). His research interests include: contemporary world economy, world development, agrarian questions, labour and gender relations, and social formations in Africa, Asia and Latin America/Caribbean.
PROVOCATION
Dr. Wildan Sena Utama (scholar of Global Political History , Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia)
My ‘intellectual provocation’ will discuss two things. First, I will investigate why the Bandung Moment – as a story of emancipation that began with the Bandung Conference and continued with intensive transnational cooperation between Asian and African anti-imperialist activists in the 1950s and 1960s – can become a platform for South-South cooperation and what form it might take. Second, drawing on historical reflections on the Bandung Moment, I will discuss the possibilities of South-South cooperation today in relation to the current situation of the Global South.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
I am a scholar of modern international and transnational history, with an interest in the history of the connections between Indonesia and the Afro-Asian world in the 20th century. I am currently working as a lecturer in global political history at the Department of History, Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. I earned my PhD at the Department of History, University of Bristol in 2023, researching on the involvement of Indonesian anti-imperialist activists in Afro-Asian movements in the 1950s-1960s to demonstrate that South-South Solidarity was central to the history of national independence, anti-imperialism, and decolonial worldmaking. I got my BA in history from Universitas Gadjah Mada and Leiden University and MA in Colonial and Global History from Leiden University.
Day 1 SESSION 2
Dr. Vijay Prashad (Director and founder, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Indian historian and journalist)
The Spirit of the Bandung
The Spirit of Bandung from the 1950s and the 1960s was defined by the contours of the freedom movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The leaders of the national liberation governments came from mass rebellions against colonialism and had to be accountable to that sentiment and those institutions. That spirit was wiped out by the 1980s, largely through the violence against the movements by the former imperialist powers and through the debt crisis imposed on these countries by the Western financial systems (whose value itself had been created through colonial theft). Today, after many decades, we see the growth of a new mood in the Global South. This mood, however, is not the same as a spirit. It is merely a hint of a new possibility. We have to study this mood and understand it to see its democratic possibilities.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. His books The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power (2022) and On Cuba (2024) were written in collaboration with Noam Chomsky.
Prashad is Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Chief Correspondent for Globetrotter. He is an editor at LeftWord Books (New Delhi), at Inkani Books (Johannesburg), and at La Trocha (Chile).
Day 2 SESSION 3
Rountable Discussion
PRAXES AND WORLDMAKING
SPEAKERS:
Naïké Garny is a PhD researcher at the Center for Culture, Conflict and Inequality (C3I) at KU Leuven in Belgium. Her research focuses on the nexus between gender, migration, and resistance. In particular, she seeks to observe women’s forms of resistance in the context of reception and to analyse reception practices from a feminist and intersectional perspective. Previously, she completed a MA in applied communication (IHECS) and a specialized MA in Gender Studies (UCLouvain). Between 2020 and the beginning of 2023, she also worked as a social worker and coordinator of a reception facility in Brussels, the Sisters’ House, which offers accommodation, information, and accompaniment to women on the move who are facing homelessness.
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Philsan Omar Osman (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the Open University in the Netherlands. She co-authored Dare to Care: Ecofeminism as a Source of Inspiration (2021), a book that reimagines care through the lens of ecofeminist practice. Her current research, part of the Innovating for Resilience program at the Open University, explores how marginalized communities in the Low Countries contribute to inclusive and transformative sustainability transitions. Originally from Somalia, Philsan is also a writer, activist, and community builder.
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Stéphanie Ngalula- Member, Collectif Mémoire Coloniale et Lutte contre les Discriminations CMCLD
Le CMCLD est un mouvement décolonial panafricain en lutte permanente pour l’édification d’une société décoloniale et antiraciste.
The CMCLD is a pan-African decolonial movement committed to the ongoing pursuit of constructing a society grounded in anti-racism and decolonial principles.
Day 2 SESSION 4
Dr. Clement Sefa-Nyarko (Scholar of Security, Development and natural resource and Climate Governance. African Leadership Centre, King’s College London. )
The intersection of ecology, (de)coloniality and policy making as site of contestation, compliance and disregard for the energy transition in the Global South.
The lecture will discuss the contestations, compliance and disregard for policy making of climate and sustainability globally. The emerging and growing landscape of climate change and environmental sustainability in response to the Paris Agreement has necessitated two crucial imperatives: One, global transitioning from fossil to renewable energy sources and two, the rush for critical minerals needed for the renewable technology of the future. This double-barrel transition affects the most vulnerable countries in the Global South more than any other region in the world: first, countries that must give up their fossil extractives industry are located in the Global South; second, most of the critical minerals (e.g., Lithium and Cobalt) are in places where their exploitation necessarily interferes with economic, physical and socio-cultural wellbeing of land and resource users in the Global South. The questions that remain unanswered in this transition, and which this class will interrogate are: whose climate, whose sustainability, whose land and environmental governance, and whose justice are we addressing in the climate and sustainability movement? The concepts of ‘environment’ and ‘sustainability’ are themselves colonial and problematic and would therefore be unpacked in this masterclass. This is because first, the focus on saving the environment assumes that humans are separated from and masters of the environment and can continue to master it whilst advancing economic benefits. Second, the focus on sustainability assumes that there is nothing wrong with the system of exploitative governance and that it is human behaviour that must change.
Notwithstanding the conceptual conundrum, policy wise, both Global North and Global South countries are locked in a revolving door of politics, political economics, and geopolitical considerations that inform how different countries respond to climate and sustainability. There are three approaches to National Energy Transitions globally despite there being some overlaps: Some countries are ‘good faith movers’, others are ’systemic contesters’, and the rest fall into a loose category of ‘laggards’, who are either disinterested in (or give ‘lip service’ to) genuine transitions, or which have the capacity to act or put plans in place, but continue to fail to prioritise climate politically. The masterclass will interrogate these drivers to unnerve the underlying tension between decoloniality and global capitalist agenda that shows mixed signals about the ambitions for the future of sustainability.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Clement is an expert in research design and methodology, focusing on resource governance, climate and energy transitions in Africa and Australia. He is co-investigator of the ARUA-The Guild Centre of Excellence on Interdisciplinary Peace Research with emphasis on climate and sustainability. His recent work addresses National Energy Transition frameworks, leadership, and environmental sustainability. He also leads impact and innovation initiatives at Global Institutes at King’s and is researching critical minerals governance for energy transitions. His experience and interest are at the interstices of academia and development practice as he has produced high quality peer reviewed articles in high impact international journals, authored opinion pieces, and managed socially impactful human development research and projects. Clement is keen to utilise his expertise in evaluation methodologies, natural resource governance, and climate governance to advance knowledge, policy and practice of development
Day 3 SESSION 5
Dr. Max Ajl ( Université de Tunis, The Merian Center for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) and Associated researcher at the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment.)
Arab Agrarian and Development Questions: Genealogies in their Contexts
This presentation offers a synthetic history of the integration of the Arab region into global capitalism and its struggles for liberation. Historical events are used to illustrate the larger historical process. It treats the regional agrarian question and examines historical and contemporary struggles for national liberation, agrarian reform, and agroecological shifts. It is panoptic and pan-regional where necessary and possible, periodizing agrarian transitions and the regional role of monopoly capital. When treating agroecology, it uses examples illustratively, as possible beacons of historical and contemporary resistance, and as lighthouses of theoretical insight . It then uses that periodization as the basis for an intellectual history of of thinking about dependency in the region and how to escape from it. It concludes by examining struggles over national sovereignty, the contours and ruptures in the political sovereignty regime, some reflections on a possible alternative model of self-reliant development through ecological delinking
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Max Ajl is a fellow at MECAM/University of Tunis, a Senior Fellow at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at Ghent University, and a researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. He is the author of a recent book titled A People’s Green New Deal, as well as an editor at Agrarian South, Middle East Critique, and Journal of Labor and Society. Max’s work has appeared in Agrarian South, the Journal of Peasant Studies, Globalizations, Middle East Critique, Review of African Political Economy, Middle East Report, and many other scholarly and popular journals. He researches climate politics, Tunisian national liberation, agrarian politics in the Arab region, and ecological planning, and Arab-North African intellectual history
Day 4 SESSION 6
Dr. Neferti Tadiar (Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Barnard College, Columbia University and Director of Puón Institute, Philippines.)
Anti-Colonial Struggle and Cultural Revolution
In this talk, I reflect on questions of anti-colonial struggle and cultural revolution in the context of what I have elsewhere called “the war to be human,” a revanchist war waged in the wake of decolonization movements since the second half of the twentieth-century. I focus on the contemporary global solidarity movement with Palestinian liberation as an anti-colonial struggle and examine the implications of this struggle taking place in U.S. universities today (manifested in the student intifada begun at Columbia University) for interdisciplinary knowledges committed to radical worldmaking transformation. How do we think about the epistemological and methodological practices of anti-colonial struggle within the interpretative framework of a global South “cultural revolution,” defined by Fredric Jameson as a historical moment of visible antagonism between co-existing modes of production? I explore one axis of solidarity between the Philippines and Palestine as a site for these reflections.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Neferti X. M. Tadiar is an interdisciplinary, postcolonial feminist scholar of Philippine cultural practice, social imagination, and global political economy. Professor Tadiar is currently the Moa Martinson Guest Professor (2024-2025) in the Division of Migration, Ethnicity, and Society at Linköping University, Norrköping, Sweden, and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University in New York city. She is the author of several books on Philippine culture, literature, and social movements, and globalization. Her most recent books are Life-Times of Becoming Human (2022), a treatise on life expenditure and global humanity, which won the 2023 Philippine National Book Award for Philosophy; and Remaindered Life (2022), an extended meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of global empire, which was awarded The ASA John Hope Franklin Prize as Best Book in American Studies in 2023. Professor Tadiar is the founding Director of the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library, an independent community library, cultural space, and publishing house in San Fernando, La Union, Philippines.