SULIMAN JABARY Omar

Units

REPI Recherche et Études en Politique Internationale

REPI is a research unit, mainly dedicated to research and studies in international politics at the Université libre de Bruxelles. It is linked to the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences. REPI fosters fundamental research in the field of international relations and aims at providing a high quality framework for the research in this field (PhD dissertations, publications, conferences...). Depending on available resources, members of REPI can also provide specific expertise for national and international institutions. Furthermore, the research centre encourages the dissemination of knowledge in international relations to a larger audience and represents a convenient space for discussing the teaching of international relations within the university. REPI also organises seminars and summer schools for professionals and young scholars.

Its scientific activities focus on two major areas of international politics: the study of security issues and international public policy (environment, health, international economics, development, etc.). These activities are rooted in several research traditions and schools of thought: foreign policy analysis, political sociology of international affairs, critical approaches to security, international political economy, etc., with the aim of better understanding power issues in international relations at different levels. The research agenda also includes the study of the European Union's external action and the main international institutions.

Director : Christian Olsson

Projetcs

Wired: The Materiality of Power in Palestine-Israël

Materiality is back. After the turn to discourse in the late twentieth century, there is a new fascination with the material stuff of life. Matter matters after all in the study of contemporary socio-political life. As part of this renewed emphasis upon materiality, infrastructures are making a conspicuous appearance and so is electricity –an infrastructure par excellence that defines the modern condition. Situated at the intersection of urban studies, political economy, settler colonialism and Middle East studies, this project sets out to investigate this material surge through an in-depth study of the ways electrification comes to matter socially, politically, economically and spatially in Palestine/Israel. The project will study in archival and ethnographic detail practices, discourses and actors that transform electricity into nodes of governance and flows of power and thereby endow infrastructures with politically potent lives that vitalize, inform and shape processes of colonialism, modernity, statecraft and development in this particular context. In doing so, the project seeks to develop a conceptualization of electricity that unsettles existing boundaries between technology and society, the material and the symbolic and the human and non-human; address the actual theoretical and empirical lacunae in social science research on electricity and electrification in colonial contexts; and produce an innovative history of the region. The approach advanced in this project underscores, on the one hand, the specific historical and political significance of electricity in maintaining and challenging social orders. And, on the other, it provides an alternative to accounts of Palestine-Israel largely defined by geopolitics and violence, offering instead a lens that allows for careful consideration of what might be learned from a reading of the seemingly mundane ‘things’ that still today connect (albeit selectively) spaces and populations otherwise increasingly divided.