Islamophobia: Ethnonationalism, Memory and Belonging
May 24 - May 26
$1.00 – $150.003rd IISRA Annual Conference, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
May 24-26, 2024
Bosniak Institute –Adil Zulfikarpašić Foundation, Sarajevo
Islamophobia: Ethnonationalism, Memory and Belonging
Memory and belonging have gained renewed and unprecedented momentum as sites of political struggle over the past few years. Past injustices, from settler colonialist dispossession and genocide, to slavery, colonialism, and racialised and other hierarchies of marginalisation and exploitation and their contemporary legacies have fed into both progressive mobilisations and backlashing culture wars over the memorialisation of public spaces, educational curricula, state heritagization and national identity narratives globally.
Galvanised by the mobilisations over the death of George Floyd and the broader sinews of institutionalised racism and inequality it exposed, and by the glaring spotlight on ethnicide and indigenous dispossession, the erosion of human rights under punitive regimes of migration and refugee policies and in the securitisation of borders and citizenship against a backdrop of ravaging climate change, neoliberalism, war and epidemic, the unfinished business of colonialism, settler-colonialism and decolonisation politicised new constituencies, instilling new urgencies, languages and literacies of catastrophe and radical change.
As these emergent forms of contention have built on or challenged diverse traditions spanning from radical antiracist and anticolonial struggle, through social democratic and liberal multiculturalist politics of inclusion, to internationalist solidarity movements for more just, plural and equal global orders, why and how have Islamophobia and counter-Islamophobia infused and been transformed by these diverse conjunctures, struggles and mobilisations? How have they fared from the local to the global, and across the terrains of nation, state and transnational formations? How have Muslim subjectivities and Muslimness figured and reconfigured between popular insurgencies and populist backlashes? How have Islamist politics, social projects and visions of justice and geopolitics been framed and reframed by Kemalism, the franchising of the Global War on Terror and the post-Cold War shifts in global order and hegemonies? How are Islamization of Knowledge and epistemic decolonising projects related and how should their failures and potential inform critical paths forward in the conceptualisation of post-Islamophobic and post-Western horizons? And how do the politics of memory, recognition, and justice differently respond to the analytics and scalar geographies and challenges of nation states, ethnopolitics, transnationalism and the ummatic?
The 2024 IISRA Sarajevo Conference offers a forum for the critical engagement and discussion of these diverse challenges facing Muslims and the world in the Age of Global Islamophobia. In both location and time, with its poignant spatial resonances of cultural and religious interaction and bloody conflict and genocide, and its temporal evocation of the centenary of the abolition of the Caliphate, it invites critical contributions to the sharpening of the conceptualisation of Islamophobia as a transnationally articulated phenomenon, diverse in its global expressions of marginalisation and dispossession, and of the governmentalisation and disciplining of Muslims. The conference fosters a space for theoretically and actively challenging Islamophobic structures of domination through the articulation of counterhegemonic fronts and critical and creative postwestern imaginings.