On 3 October 2023, the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice and the School of Law’s Human Rights Centre jointly hosted Professor Jillian Schwedler, who spoke about her latest book, Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent, which was published with Stanford University Press in 2022.

In this seminar, Professor Schwelder delivered a fascinating presentation, which drew on field research in Jordan from 1995 to 2020 – which equates to approximately five years of residence – and entailed hundreds of interviews, ethnographies of protest and places, and extensive archival research in English and Arabic.  

The lively discussion focused on diverse topics including the extent to repression of protests can shape the development of urban environments, how protests can attach meaning to locations, the ways in which protests and media coverage of them can exert pressure on regimes, and the ethics of doing fieldwork in sensitive issues.

This event, which was chaired by Mitchell Institute Deputy Director and Theme Lead: Legacy, Professor Louise Mallinder, was attended by academics and postgraduate students from multiple disciplines including law, politics, geography, architecture.

Professor Schwedler is a professor of political science at the City University of New York.  Her research engages questions of contentious politics, political geography, Islamist politics, policing, neoliberalism, and political dissent.  She explores how these issues are manifest within the Middle East and North Africa.  This has included conducting previous research in Jordan, Yemen, and Egypt.

She has published widely on these topics with her research appearing in World Politics, Comparative Politics, Journal of Democracy, and Social Movement Studies, among many others.  In addition, she is the author of the award-winning monograph Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (Cambridge 2006).  She also co-edited (with Laleh Khalili), Policing and Prisons in the Middle East (Columbia/Hurst 2010).