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Joint CfP for BISA 2025: Critical Studies on Terrorism and Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Groups

Photo of the so-called peace walls in Belfast.

Anticolonial Solidarities and Resistance

Proscribing anticolonial movements and indigenous struggles for national liberation and self-determination as terrorists and terrorism is a consistent strategy of imperialism and settler states. Terrorism is not so much the name given to a particular form of political violence, says Heike Schotten, as an ideological tool by which resistance to empire and colonisation is illegitimated out of existence. Proscription not only engenders legal obstacles against anticolonial movements, but it also hypermoralises them, casting their political demands as illegitimate and anachronistic. 

We are hoping to put together at least one panel that draws attention to the different tactics employed to buttress the moral castigation of resistance, such as the racialised and orientalist employment of sexuality and gender. This panel would host research and discussion on the plasticity of the label “terrorist” and the conditions under which anticolonial movements move in and out of this ideological terrain. It speaks to the similarities between the cases of Irish and Palestinian resistance against imperial and settler control, as well as other cases, such as the Kurdish and Kashmiri movements and indigenous struggles worldwide. 

If you are interested in your article submission being considered for this panel, please state this clearly in your abstract, and submit your article for either Critical Studies on Terrorism OR Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial tracks.

Some questions to keep in mind:

  • What tools have anti-imperial feminist, queer/trans and anti-racist thinking offered these movements to help them resist the criminalisation of their struggles?
  • How is ‘terrorism’ used to suppress anticolonial resistance?
  • How is sexuality and gender employed to target anti-colonial movements? Alternatively, what tools do anti-imperial feminist, queer/trans and anti-racist thinking offer us to make sense of the present global moment? 
  • How do you learn from liberatory traditions to imagine anti-colonial resistance? 
  • What do the particular cases of either Ireland or Palestine tell us about this relationship? 

If you have any queries, please contact us at cst.group@bisa.ac.uk.

Image: Photo taken by Dr Michael Livesey.