Graduate Institute of International Studies - International Conference:
The New Palestine, The New Europe: Emerging Models in Society & Culture
February 24th-25th, 2001

The Graduate Institute of International Studies (GIIS) held an international conference February 24th and 25th, 2001 under the title "The New Palestine, the New Europe: Emerging Models in Society and Culture." This conference was planned for more than a year ago, and was to have been held at the end of October 2000. Because of the situation on the ground at the time, however, it was postponed, and somewhat adapted to the rather extraordinary conditions now prevailing. The presence of six academic experts from various European countries, as well as the contributions made by researchers from Palestine, contributed to the undoubted success of the exercise, whose proceedings, as is always the case with our conferences, will be published as soon as possible.

As the conference program shows, the conference covered a variety of topics related to emerging models in and between Palestine and Europe, which is to say, it dealt essentially with the last decade of the twentieth century. For anybody who sat through its two days of sessions, it is clear that developments in the various fields are interlinked and of great mutual relevance. This is true, whether one is speaking of the course followed by the Palestinian popular and national movement, gender relations in Palestine, the emergence of the new European right, the march towards European unity, the effects of globalization on Palestine, or themes related to art, architecture, city planning and storytelling on both sides of the Mediterranean.

The active participation of the large number of people who attended the conference, many of whom were graduate and undergraduate students and professors, but including people from the society at large, attested to the importance of holding this conference despite, or rather because of, the active effort to isolate Palestine, the Palestinians and their civil society institutions. This leap over the occupation to join hands with the international academic community was universally judged a great success.