October 7th: One Year On, The War Is Escalating

In this video, Security in Context Director Omar Dahi speaks with Mandy Turner, Sami Hermez, Jamil Mouawad, Abdalhadi Alijla, and Bashir Saade about the Israel's War on Palestine and Lebanon one year after Hamas’ October 7th attack.

Mandy Turner is a senior researcher with Security in Context. Her research focuses on the political economy of conflict and peace, humanitarianism and multilateralism, and the situation in Israel and Palestine. She has 25 years’ experience of these issues and has pursued research, writing and consultancy work through a variety of sectors. She is the author of over 50 articles and book chapters, has edited or co-edited four books and three journal special issues, and writes for media outlets. She holds a PhD in International Relations (2000), an MSc in International Relations (1994), and a BSc in Sociology (1993) from the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.

Sami Hermez, PhD, is director of the Liberal Arts Program and associate professor in residence of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of “War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon” (UPenn 2017), which focuses on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon and how people recollect and anticipate this violence, and “My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine” (Stanford 2024), that tells the story of a Palestinian family resisting ongoing Israeli settler colonialism. His next project remains top secret and will only be explained for now should you meet him in person.

Jamil Mouawad is Assistant Professor of Politics and Policy at the Department of Political Studies and Public Administration at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. He was awarded a PhD in politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in June 2015. Later, he joined the Institut Français du Proche-Orient (IFPO) in Beirut, as a postdoctoral fellow, through a grant from the Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS). He also acted as a researcher coordinator of the Critical Security Studies in the Arab world and the Ethics in Social sciences project, both on-going projects launched by ACSS. His research interests in state-society relations span the subfields of comparative politics and political economy.

Abdalhadi Alijla is a social and political scientist and science advocate. He is the recipient of 2021 International Political Science Association Global South Award. He is a co-founder of Palestine Young Academy in 2020. He is an Associate Researcher and the Regional Manager of Varieties of Democracy Institute (Gothenburg University) for Gulf countries. He is a Post-doctoral fellow at the Orient Institute in Beirut (OIB). Since 2021, he is an associate fellow within SEPAD, sectarianism, proxies and de-sectorisation at Lancaster University.

Bashir Saade is an Interdisciplinary Lecturer in Politics and Religion at the University of Stirling. He previously held posts at the University of Edinburgh and at the American University of Beirut. Saade has a PhD in War Studies at King’s College, and an MSc in International Political Economy from LSE. His research has been fundamentally interdisciplinary, crossing between international politics, anthropology, literary studies, social theory, and more recently sound studies. His book, titled “Hizbullah and the Politics of Remembrance” (Cambridge University Press, 2016), is a theoretical contribution to the concept of Ideology in political studies that proposed an intellectual history of the Lebanese political party that contrasted with prevailing understandings of Islamic political movements and their relationship with national imagination and state formation.

Edited by Nick Bythrow

Graphics by Owen Neuburger