Department of Social Research

Course Description: How is what we call " the Middle East " understood and experienced today? How has it emerged and taken shape as a living concept? This course studies the Middle East and North Africa not as a given region, but rather as a set of processes—as social and historical geographies always in formation. In this course, we explore how historical, political, and cultural questions combine to give shape to what is understood as the Middle East and North Africa. Through ethnography, literature, historiography, and film, this course examines the different ways in which the Middle East and North Africa are lived and experienced. Themes covered in this course include: colonialism, religion & experience, oil, memory, revolutions past & present, migration, refugees, and minorities in the Middle East and North Africa, among others.

Instructor: Joseph J. Viscomi (viscomi@umich.edu)
Meeting times: Monday & Wednesday, 2:30-4:00
Location: 2009 RUTHVEN

With Italy's entry into the Second World War, Anglo-Egyptian authorities repatriated Italian diplomats from Egypt, arrested around 5,000 Italians, and sequestered both personal and business accounts. Italian institutions were indefinitely closed, including the Italian state schools. Hope for a future in Egypt among the roughly 60,000 Italian residents faded. The Salesian missionary schools, whose goal since the late nineteenth century had been to inculcate nationalist-religious sentiment in Italy's emigrants, remained the only active Italian educational institution by claiming Vatican protection. As such, the missionary schools assumed a central role in the lives of many young Italians. After the war, these same young Italians began to depart Egypt en masse, in part driven by the possibilities opened up by their vocational training. Building on diplomatic, institutional and private archives, this article demonstrates how the Salesian missionary schools attempted and failed to integrate Italian immigrants into the Egyptian labour force through vocational training. This failure combined with socioeconomic and geopolitical changes to propel Italian departures from Egypt, making emigrants out of immigrants.

In the post-World War II era human rights have emerged as an enormous global phenomenon. In Finland human rights have particularly in the 1990s moved from the periphery to the center of public policy making and political rhetoric. Human rights education is commonly viewed as the decisive vehicle for emancipating individuals of oppressive societal structures and rendering them conscious of the equal value of others; both core ideals of the abstract discourse. Yet little empirical research has been conducted on how these goals are realized in practice.

These factors provide the background for the present study which, by combining anthropological insights with critical legal theory, has analyzed the educational activities of a Scandinavian and Nordic network of human rights experts and PhD students in 2002-2005. This material has been complemented by data from the proceedings of UN human rights treaty bodies, hearings organized by the Finnish Foreign Ministry, the analysis of different human rights documents as well as the manner human rights are talked of in the Finnish media.

As the human rights phenomenon has expanded, human rights experts have acquired widespread societal influence. The content of human rights remains, nevertheless, ambiguous: on the one hand they are law, on the other, part of a moral discourse. By educating laymen on what human rights are, experts act both as intermediaries and activists who expand the scope of rights and simultaneously exert increasing political influence. In the educational activities of the analyzed network these roles were visible in the rhetorics of legality and legitimacy . Among experts both of these rhetorics are subject to ongoing professional controversy, yet in the network they are presented as undisputable facts. This contributes to the impression that human rights knowledge is uncontested.

This study demonstrates how the network s activities embody and strengthen a conception of expertise as located in specific, structurally determined individuals. Simultaneously its conception of learning emphasizes the adoption of knowledge by students, emphasizing the power of experts over them. The majority of the network s experts are Nordic males, whereas its students are predominantly Nordic females and males from East-European and developing countries. Contrary to the ideals of the discourse the network s activities do not create dialogue, but instead repeat power structures which are themselves problematic.

Mobile yet Stagnant: Examining Human Rights Monitoring

The ‘international human rights movement’ is in many ways defined by this very term - movement. Whether through the circulation of discourse(s), expert practices or documents, ‘the movement’ contains hardly any stable elements including the very concept of human rights.

This finding certainly applies to the reporting ‘cycles’ of UN human rights monitoring carried out by treaty bodies. In these processes draft documents first circulate ‘locally’ as states prepare their ‘State reports’; they then go ‘global’ in UN offices where they are examined both by the ‘immobile’ staff of the UN secretariat and the ‘mobile’ experts journeying in from all corners of the world; only to travel back to their original contexts to ideally gain further mileage as policy initiatives, media accounts and subtle cultural change.

Jointly this movement pushes the ethnographer’s anthropological imagination to the limit. I discuss my own methodological techniques through my ongoing study of the state report of Finland on the CCPR to be processed by the UN Human Rights Committee in July 2013. This project has taken me from participation in documentary drafts at the Foreign Ministry to UN Offices, to ‘local’ and ‘global’ NGOs, skype sessions, facebook sites, chatrooms and twitter accounts.

Whereas constant mobility tints my fieldwork strongly, it also matters surprisingly little - after all, I am examining a distinct social space irrespective of its concrete locality. Thus constant movement produces ironically also its opposite: it contributes to a certain stagnation of the diverse localities that it frequents.