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Laure Guirguis

AIAS FORMER FELLOW

Current position: Freie Universität, Berlin, and the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin, Germany

During her AIAS-COFUND Fellowship, Laure Guirguis has worked on the project 'The New Left in the Arab East: Entangled Histories of Revolutionary Hopes and Violence (1956-1979)'

 

Project at AIAS

Has the Left in the Arab world simply become trapped in violence and identity politics? Does its legacy consist solely in self-criticism and “a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses”? (Traverso) By remapping the dynamics of rupture and continuities in militant trajectories, I intend to shed light on the resilience of Arab radical and democratic traditions that took shape in spite of local and global wars, state coercion, and repeated failures. What may best characterize the revolutionary dynamics in the 1960s and 1970s worldwide lies in the junction between contesting social and cultural norms and challenging a political and economic order. A history of the New Left in the Arab East could be written through this lens. To that end, I examine its numerous attempts to overthrow interlocking systems of power: to bridge the gap between workers or peasants and students, to rethink the connection between social struggles and national emancipation, and to experiment with new forms of organization, of leadership, of social life, and of gender relationships, in the constitutive interplay between local, regional, and transnational frames of reference. 

Project title:

The New Left in the Arab East: Entangled Histories of Revolutionary Hopes and Violence (1956-1979)

Area of research:

Social history, cultural History, and transnational History

Fellowship period:

1 Oct 2019 - 30 Sep 2022

Fellowship type:

AIAS-COFUND II Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow

This fellowship has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 754513 and The Aarhus University Research Foundation.