Somdeep SenRoskilde University · Department of Society and Globalisation (ISG)
Somdeep Sen
PhD in Political Science
About
43
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75
Citations
Citations since 2017
Publications
Publications (43)
This essay explores the impact of Europe’s colonial past on the nature of the European Union’s engagement with Turkey as a candidate country, under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. It begins by arguing the European Union’s role as a normative power replicates a colonial trope of external engagement that assumes the world beyond the metropole...
In Decolonizing Palestine, Somdeep Sen rejects the notion that liberation from colonialization exists as a singular moment in history when the colonizer is ousted by the colonized. Instead, he considers the case of the Palestinian struggle for liberation from its settler colonial condition as a complex psychological and empirical mix of the colonia...
The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank explores the manner in which the Palestinian Authority’s performative acts affect and shape the lives and subjective identities of those in its vicinity in the occupied West Bank. The nature of Palestinians’ statelessness has to contend with the rituals of statecraft that the Palestinian Authority (PA) and...
Most of the literature on Hamas that focuses on its role as both a government and a resistance movement has emphasized how the organization either is conditioned historically to being a sociopolitical and military entity or is treading a path of de-radicalization. Emphasizing the limitations of such analyses, this article proposes a recalibration o...
This article studies the violent politics of stigmatisation and erasure of nationalist urban infrastructure. In general, urban infrastructure is a mechanism of state power. But, through the case of the imposing presence of Turkish nationalist infrastructure in the Kurdish city Diyarbakir, it demonstrates that when tied to an antagonistic nationalis...
Discussions of race and racism are often missing in the curriculum of international relations courses or, when present, categorized as a "critical approach" and placed outside the mainstream. But this absence or marginalization from the mainstream of the discipline does not mean that such discussions are beyond the scope of its primary agenda-that...
There is a state-centrism in the way insurgencies are conceived in international politics. Herein, policy and practice targeting insurgencies draw on the long-established scholarly perception that war-making is the vocation of the state and that the violence of non-state insurgent factions is a source of insecurity. However, this state-centrism als...
This chapter is not about the European Union per se. It is, however, about the “idea” of Europe as a force for good in international politics that informs the very being of the European Union and shapes its external relations with the Middle East. Terming this a “postcolonial critique” of EU–Middle East relations, this chapter is very much inspired...
Language is never just a means of communication. It terrorizes. And, especially in times of war, it has the ability to target civilians and generate fear as a means of producing specific political outcomes, most notably the passive and active acceptance of state violence itself. For this reason, the critical examination of language must be a centra...
Historically, Denmark was a “first-mover” as a signatory to liberal international humanitarian laws and conventions, especially with regard to refugees. Yet, in recent years Denmark has cherished the role of a different kind of “first mover” – namely as hardliner when it comes to immigration policies. This is evident in the existent political disco...
This chapter provides an overview of the Palestinian struggle for liberation and describes the author's fieldwork in the Gaza Strip, Israel, and Egypt, conducted between 2013 and 2016. The Gaza Strip as a whole became a place of contradictions when Hamas adopted a dual mode of existence following its historic victory in the 2006 Palestinian Legisla...
This chapter analyzes the historical geopolitical events that led to the introduction of postcoloniality in Palestine. It argues that the Oslo Accords ensured that the postcolonial lives alongside the anticolonial in a still-persistent colonial condition in the Palestinian territories. Specifically, this is an outcome of two relevant legacies of th...
This chapter takes the discussion of the long moment of liberation beyond Palestine. Using examples from India, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Tanzania, Cuba, and Turkish Kurdistan, it demonstrates that, just as the postcolonial exists in the era of colonial rule, so does the struggle for liberation continue long after the withdrawal of the colonizer. Thi...
This chapter demonstrates the manner in which Hamas's postcolonial governance persists in a colonial nonstate context. Despite the “real” Palestinian state being nonexistent, it is necessary to take the materiality of the imagined state seriously. However, in doing so, the aspiration is not to determine “how much” or “how little” Hamas acts like a...
This chapter focuses on Hamas's anticolonial resistance, not least as a means of emphasizing the colonized's existence and cultivating their liberated peoplehood. Drawing on interviews with members of the organization and Palestinians who have participated in, been witness to, or suffered the human and material consequences of Palestinian armed res...
This chapter discusses the Palestinian moment of liberation. It recognizes that Hamas presents an extreme case because Palestinian postcoloniality has, to an extent, been concretized by way of the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and its accompanying institutions under the Oslo Accords. Nonetheless, the case of Hamas shows that liberation...
This chapter situates the Gaza Strip within Israel's settler colonialism as a way of contextualizing the Palestinian anticolonial subjectivity. While recognizing the Nakba , or catastrophe, of 1948 as having begun the historical process of materializing the settler colonial “dream” of Palestinian nonexistence, it argues that the urge to eliminate t...
In this article I argue that while the COVID-19 outbreak is at its early stages in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian coastal enclave is particularly vulnerable to its effects – not least due to the multiplicity of existing development challenges that have resulted from an ongoing Israeli and Egyptian-imposed blockade. With the economy at a standstill...
This research report discusses individual level barriers and enablers in migrants' labour market integration across seven European countries. It draws on over 100 biographic interviews with migrants, refugees and asylum seekers carried out in early 2020.
This article introduces and develops the concept of “antagonistic landscapes” on the basis of fieldwork conducted in the Israeli settlement Efrat in the occupied West Bank and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem campus on Mount Scopus. The concept refers to the ways in which powerful actors antagonize “unwanted” communities by means of the physicali...
Since the start of the conflict in Syria in 2011, Syrian refugee children have withstood violence, uncertainty, fear, trauma and loss. This book follows their journeys by bringing together scholars and practitioners to reflect on how to make their situation better and to get this knowledge to as many front liners - across European and neighbouring...
Since the start of the conflict in Syria in 2011, Syrian refugee children have withstood violence, uncertainty, fear, trauma and loss. This book follows their journeys by bringing together scholars and practitioners to reflect on how to make their situation better and to get this knowledge to as many front liners - across European and neighbouring...
It is not a particularly novel academic endeavour to explore Hamas’ armed resistance. Nevertheless, this essay contributes to the conversation by deliberating on the organization's military faction through the stories my informants told of their experiences and memories of resistance. With these stories in mind, I argue Hamas’ resistance is revered...
Two decades later, how should we conceptualize the relevance of the Oslo Accords today? This article reconstitutes our understanding of the Accords through three parameters and purports that the legacy of the Interim Agreement is one that oscillates between what it has failed to achieve with regard to the Palestinian quest for statehood and what it...
In 1995, the Dayton Accords were signed to effectively end the war in Bosnia. This agreement subsequently divided power and territory among ethnic Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims). As a result of this, a controversial territorial entity, namely Republika Srpska (Republic of Serbia) was created within Bosnia-Herzegovina. Dominated by eth...
Since its inception the European Union has transformed itself from a mere economic partnership to a regional cooperation, supposedly, embodying laws and values 'universally' accepted as 'good'. This very character has encouraged the EU to pursue the role of a global actor that not only personifies this 'value-system' but also strives at disseminati...
Projects
Projects (4)
Using the case of the West Bank as a site of overlapping narratives of Palestinian and Israeli national identities, this project will contribute to the conversation on ideology and landscapes by exploring the manner in which a common physical territory is able to inform conflicting national identities. Building on the extensive literature that posits landscapes as imbued with political, cultural and legal ‘meaning’, it will challenge the perception of a landscape as merely incidental to, or an outcome of, certain ideologies. Instead, by claiming that a landscape, once instilled with meanings, is able to continually perpetuate and generate the ideology written into it, this project will elevate the landscape as a central figure in national identity formation.
This project is about smart city projects and their impact on urban citizenship. Specifically, it focuses on the new forms of (contestation over) citizenship that emerge as a consequence of smart city initiatives. Implementing visions of future urban place-making are inherently contested processes because everyday practices of urban residents and their identity-making are invested in the spatial and material surfaces of the city. However, smart city initiatives are often conceived as apolitical due the highly technological and technocratic processes that guides them and their vision of urban development and social improvement. The project approaches smart cities and citizenship contestations through three related analytical and methodological lenses: Citizenship, smart city visions, and the governance of visions. Case studies take place in three highly unequal cities. Johannesburg, Mumbai and Nairobi are subjected to disjunctive comparison.
n a global, urbanized world with the majority of people living in urban areas and high numbers living in slums/informal settlements, there has been a call by many governments to resettle urban slums in the light of extreme weather events and disasters such as urban floods. However, relocation processes post-disasters have been proven unsuccessful in the past as post-disaster resettlements in the pastbhave shown resettled communities being affected by flooding and other disasters. In this context, this project will investigate how resettlement of urban slums is creating new disaster risks. This project is built around a synergistic partnership between University of Copenhagen, Roskilde University in Denmark and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in India. This project will contribute with new knowledge on how disaster risk is created in urban resettlement and push the field of disaster studies in a new direction theoretically highlighting the contours of disaster risk creation.
