Roundtable discussion: Comparing the partitions - India and Palestine 1947/1948

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The decision to devolve power from imperial Britain to India and Palestine happened in the same year - August for India, November for Palestine. The recently published volume The Breakup of India and Palestine, examines the international and national circumstances of these decisions. 

Articles compare the long history of the growth of local antagonisms under colonial conditions, as well as the immediate context of the wars and the question of imperial continuity. The contemporary relevance of this reflection can hardly be over-emphasised.  Historical comparisons help focus the light on systems and processes as well as underlying political structures.   

The Roundtable will feature presentations by Victor Kattan, Mohamed-Ali Adraoui, Arie Dubnov and Laura Robson on their contributions to the book and responses by Nandini Chatterjee and Atef Alshaer. 

Further information on the book can be found on the Manchester University Press website.

About the speakers

Mohamed-Ali Adraoui is an Assistant Professor in Middle East History and Politics at Radboud University. He has extensively published in the fields of radical and political Islam, as well as the International Relations of the Middle East. He has published at Oxford University Press on the globalisation of Salafism. His articles have been published in academic journals such as: International Affairs, International Politics, Journal of Historical Sociology, Mediterranean Politics and Georgetown Journal of International Affairs.  

Atef Alshaer is a senior lecturer in Arabic Studies at the University of Westminster. He is the author of several publications in the fields of language, literature and politics including  Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World (C Hurst, 2016); The Hizbullah Phenomenon : Politics and Communication (with Dina Matar and Lina Khatib, 2014); Language and national identity in Palestine: representation of power and resistance in Gaza (I.B. Tauris, 2022) Alshaer regularly contributes to academic and media outlets, including the BBC, Independent, Electronic Intifada, Radio Monocle, al-Arabi al-Jadid and Aljazeera.  He also writes and translates poetry. 

Nandini Chaterjee, a historian of South Asia at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on law and colonial and pre-colonial imperial regimes in South Asia. She has directed the production of a digital archive of Persian and multi-lingual legal documents produced across the Indian Ocean world. She is currently involved in a new project on colonial heritage in post-imperial Britain and France.   

Arie Dubnov is an associate professor and the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies at George Washington University.  He is a historian of twentieth-century Jewish and Israeli history. His publications include Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Palgrave, 2012) and an edited volume with Laura Robson Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford University Press, 2019).   

Victor Kattan is an assistant professor in the School of Law at the University of Nottingham.  He is the author of more than thirty articles in peer-reviewed academic journals and the author or editor of four books, including the latest Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli conflicts in the History of International Law (With Brian Cuddy, MUP, 2023) and Violent Radical Movements in the Arab World: The ideology and Politics of Non-State Actors (with Peter Sluglett, Bloomsbury, 2019).  

Laura Robson is the Oliver-McCourtney Professor of History at Penn State University.  She has written or edited five books, most recently The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East  (Oxford University Press, 2020), and edited volume with Arie Dubnov Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford University Press, 2019).   

• Organiser: SOAS Library
• Contact: librarycomms@soas.ac.uk