Somdeep Sen is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University in Denmark. He’s also a Research Associate at the Centre for Asian Studies in Africa at the University of Pretoria. He is the author of Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the anticolonial and the postcolonial (Cornell University Press, 2020), which was also translated into Italian by Meltemi Editore in 2023. He currently serves as an editor of Critical Studies on Security and his writings have appeared in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera English, The Huffington Post, Jacobin and The London Review of Books.
Abstract:
There is a growing acknowledgement of the racialised makings and workings of the contemporary global order. But how does this history and legacy shape our conception of the politics of Israel-Palestine?
This lecture will navigate questions of race and racism in international relations and the manner in which they shape discourse, policy, and practice as it relates to war and peace in the ‘Holy Land‘.
This lecture is part of the 2026 ALMA Lecture Series titled 'Global Ruptures or New Beginnings? Southern Perspectives on World Politics'. The ALMA (Africa, Latin America, Middle East and Asia) Lecture series is a series organised by the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute at the University of Freiburg in cooperation with the Colloquium Politicum addressing theoretical, empirical and methodological questions from a Global South perspective. This year’s lecture series is co-organised with the De/Coloniality Now Initiative of the University of Freiburg. This multidisciplinary initiative seeks to understand the impact of coloniality on today’s world and the ways in which people and institutions in all regions of the world, including our own, remember, perpetuate, and contest the legacy of colonialism with a focus on the present day (“now”).
