US power in the Middle East: Anti-imperialist politics in times of global crises & uncertainty

US President Donald Trump’s announcement of the Deal of the Century (on Palestinian statehood) and the targeted assassination of Iran’s Major-General Qassem Soleimani demonstrate how the US induces and reproduces imperial chaos, crises and uncertainty across the whole world.

How should South African activists understand continued US meddling in the Middle East? What will be the short- and long-term implications of this for the peoples of the Middle East, for us in South Africa, and for the rest of the world? Given contested meanings of the mass rejection of US hegemony by the peoples of the Middle East and echoes with South African anti-imperialist discourses, how should progressive anti-imperialist politics look like in this period of crisis and uncertainty? What to learn from post-Arab Spring popular struggles that challenge both US hegemony and the region’s vested regimes? What are the prospects for imaginative solutions from below out of this global crises and uncertainty?

The public seminar will probe these questions using the frame of crisis and uncertainty as a fertile ground for creative activism and imaginative popular movements. This will be the first Tshisimani seminar for 2020.

Speaker: Naeem Jeenah (Afro-Middle East Centre)

Tuesday, 18 February 2020 @18h00

Activist workshop (by invite only): 13h00 to 17h00

Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education

67-69 Main Road, Mowbray, Cape Town