Visiting speaker: Daniel Meier - Bordering the Middle East? Some reflections on conceptual tools in border studies

This presentation intends to delve into the question of understanding and conceptualizing border issues in the specific context of the contemporary Middle East. I will first underscore a usual misconception of the border as a line in order to elaborate on the evolution of the notion itself in the dedicated literature and then to propose a triple angle to think and conceptualize border as a process. Such tools will help me to delineate three key questions addressed to the Middle East region in a diachronic perspective. Four analytical conceptual tools stemming from the border studies subfield will then be approached through examples in order to assess their efficiency and limits in the specific terrain of the Middle East. I will end the presentation with the fieldwork example of the memorial museum of Mleeta erected by Hizbullah in the South of Lebanon and understood as a borderscape.

Biography
Daniel Meier is currently associated researcher at CNRS-PACTE in Grenoble and teaches at Sciences Po Grenoble and Ca’Foscari University (Venice). During the Spring 2020, he will be Visiting Professor at the University of Turin. He conducted extensive fieldwork in the Middle East and was a former senior associate member of the St Antony’s College (Oxford). His researches focus on the relationship between space and identity in the Middle East. The Special issue “Bordering the Middle East” he edited in Geopolitics (Vol. 23, No 3, 2018) has been published as a book by Routledge in 2019.