Call for Papers: "Reconstruction of War-Torn Societies in the Middle East and Africa", 06/02

Final Call for Papers: Reconstruction and its Futures: Essays on the Reconstruction of War-Torn Societies in the Middle East and Africa

Editors: Ibrahim Elnur and Martina Rieker

Reconstruction and its Futures is the first of a series of engagements with the challenges of post-conflict reconstruction in the Middle East and Africa. The purpose of this project is to explore and interrogate challenges to reconstruction in the aftermath of the failure of developmentalism and an increasingly globalized world. The majority of the contributions in this volume come from a workshop on the subject held in Cairo in May 2001. With this final call for papers we would like to address certaingeographical and theoretical gaps in the volume.

We are seeking papers in the following areas:

1. Papers that explore the production and reproduction of discourses of indigeneity during periods of conflict, and their impact on post-conflict reconstruction efforts in Central and Western Africa

2. Papers that interrogate ways in which conflict constructs difference along racial lines in the relatively homogenous social spaces of East Africa, and their impact on the shaping of a post-war polity.

3. Papers addressing questions relating to the retreat of the state, and the emergence of new local non-state actors in the reconstruction processes in East, West, Central or Northern Africa.

4. Papers exploring ways in which new international regimes impact on the (re) articulation of local social imaginaries in the reconstruction of discrete African social spaces (excluding South Africa).

This edited volume will be submitted to a major US University Press later this summer. Interested authors are invited to submit papers 20-25 pages in length as soon as possible but no later than June 30, 2002. Please attach a CV with your submission to ielnur@aucegypt.edu and mrieker@aucegypt.edu

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The Reconstruction of War-Torn Communities in the Middle East and Africa (RWCMEA) Working Group is coordinated by Ibrahim Elnur (American University in Cairo),Martina Rieker (American University in Cairo) and Rabab Abdulhadi (New York University). RWCMEA is an autonomous working group housed at the Middle East Awards for Population and Social Sciences in Cairo (Egypt) and the Office of African Studies at the American University in Cairo. The primary goals of the working group are to contribute to the articulation of a new interdisciplinary field of reconstruction studies within the global academy. Of particular concern is the development of new theoretical frameworks grounded in the historical and spatial realities of the political present -- marked by globalization, transnationalism and the failure of development agendas --in the MENA region and Africa.