This event explores how and why international law and ideas of humanity attend to, and exceptionalise, the case of Palestine and Palestinians. İt brings together scholars of international law, media, culture, human rights and politics.

You can watch the video recording or listen to the podcast of this event.

Meet our speakers and chair

Bashir Abu-Manneh is Reader in Postcolonial Literature and Head of School of Classics, English, and History at the University of Kent. He is the author of The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present (2016), Fiction of the New Statesman, 1913-1939 (2011), and has edited a volume entitled After Said: Postcolonial Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century (2019).

Mahvish Ahmad is Assistant Professor of Human Rights and Politics in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights. She studies state violence and social movements, including the Global War on Terror. She recently published an article entitled Movement Texts as Anti-Colonial Theory (2023).

Conor Gearty is Professor of Human Rights Law at LSE and Barrister Matrix Chambers. His next book to be published by Polity in 2024 is entitled Homeland Insecurity: the Rise and Rise of Global Anti-terrorism Law.

Neve Gordon, Professor of International Law and Human Rights, QMUL and Vice President of the British Society for Middle East Studies.

Dina Matar is Professor in Political Communication and Arab Media and Director of the Centre for Global Media and Communications at SOAS. She works on the relationship between culture, communication and politics in the Middle East, with a special focus on Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. She is co-editor of Gaza as Metaphor (2016) and Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communications Practices in Lebanon and Palestine (2013).

Chana Morgenstern is Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Middle Eastern Literature at Cambridge University and a Fellow at Newnham College. She works on Middle Eastern literatures, histories and cultures of the Arab left, and anticolonial and postcolonial theory. Her book Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Collaboration Under Colonialism is forthcoming in 2023.

Gerry Simpson teaches international law at LSES. His latest book is The Sentimental Life of International Law (2022). His latest essay, The Left and Ukraine, is published in Arena.

Dr Ayça Çubukçu is Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at LSE. She is the author of For the Love of Humanity: the World Tribunal on Iraq (2018). Dr Çubukçu co-edits LSE International Studies Series at Cambridge University Press as well as Humanity Journal.