After a century of prohibition, we are witnessing a dramatic shift in cannabis culture and policy around the world from a “killer weed” and a cause of racial degeneration to an accepted recreational drug and a “magic medicine.” In his lecture, Haggai Ram will examine this global shift of cannabis by focusing on the social history of the drug (i.e., hashish and marijuana) in Palestine-Israel from the late nineteenth century to the present.

In this talk, based on her book, The Colonizing Self, Kotef explores the cultural, political, and theoretical apparatuses that enable people and nations to construct a home on the ruins of other people’s homes or to feel that they belong to spaces of dispossession. Moving from analysis of contemporary Israeli TV shows to theorizations of settlers’ violence in the West Bank, Kotef examines the affectual conditions of settler colonialism. She tries to understand how, in conditions of systematic, prolonged violence, people develop attachment to the violence they inflict on others. 

This is the first study of Israeli foreign policy towards the Middle East and selected world powers including China, India, the European Union and the United States since the end of the Cold War. The book provides an integrated account of these foreign policy spheres and serves as an essential historical context for the domestic political scene during these pivotal decades. In my talk, I shall demonstrate how Israeli foreign policy is shaped by domestic factors, which are represented as three concentric circles of decision-makers, the security network and Israeli national identity.

The religion-and-state debate in Israel is Jewish centred and systematically disregards the Palestinian-Arab minority. This is rather puzzling. For the religion-and-state debate in many other countries does take up conflicts pertaining to minority religions, and the Palestinian-Arab minority did generate quite a diverse series of questions that could have easily qualified as part of the existing debate. In this article, I decode this anomaly by pointing out the existence of a legal matrix in the Israeli religion-and-state debate.

Over the past two decades, the Turkish state has transformed from an imperfect parliamentary system to a highly centralized presidential regime. State institutions are increasingly political and informal in their day-to-day operation, and unusually susceptible to the influence of business groups, religious networks, regional cliques and organized crime. In theory, the “Erdogan System” pits these networks against each other to compete in the achievement of government objectives.

How do you build theory based on empirical research? What is the relationship between theory and data collection, and how does it vary across disciplines? What is the difference between theory-building and theory-testing? What kinds of ‘theory’ are relevant for particular kinds of research? In this session, we bring together three scholars working across disciplines on a range of exciting empirical issues. Prof.