This event is taking place as part of the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair, three days of workshops and tabling with music performances at night.

Beginning with a sketch as to why the “obvious” solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have never materialized, this talk moves on to identify structures that makes solutions that appear “realistic” to be actually impossible in practical terms. It addresses histories of Palestinian self-organization and agency as well as larger Middle Eastern social histories to show the error of focusing on states and state-centered solutions—the idea being that modern states in the region have all an imposed nature, which each state being the enemy of a substantial part of the population it rules, and further how these states generate conflicts and wars by the very nature of their structure. The larger Middle Eastern context currently includes five major wars, countless smaller zones of hostilities or civil wars, and impending financial collapse of a few countries. The idea of the no-state solution is offered as an adjustment to the historical nature of social self-organization in the region.

Mohammed Bamyeh is a sociology professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He previously served as chair of the board of trustees of the Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS); editor of International Sociology Reviews; affiliated fellow of EUME in Berlin; and as a senior fellow at the IFK in Vienna. He taught at, among other places, New York University, Georgetown University, and the University of Massachusetts. His publications include: Lifeworlds of Islam: Pragmatics of a Religion (Oxford 2019); Social Sciences in the Arab World: Forms of Presence (ACSS 2015); and Anarchy as Order: The History and Future of Civic Humanity (Rowman & Littlefield 2009).

Shuli Branson is a queer/trans anarchist writer, translator, community organizer, and teacher. They translated Jacques Lesage de la Haye’s The Abolition of Prison and Guy Hocquenghem’s second book of essays, Gay Liberation after May ’68, for which they also wrote a critical introduction. Shuli is the author of Practical Anarchism: A Daily Guide and is currently working on a book on trans-anarcha-feminism. They often contribute to The Final Straw Radio, a weekly anarchist radio show and podcast.