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You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: A Conversation with Sanaa Seif and Sharif Abdel Kouddous about Human Rights in Egypt

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ARD You Have Not Yet Been Defeated event

In this talk, prominent political activist Sanaa Seif and award-winning journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous will discuss the current political conditions in Egypt, the massive expansion of the carceral state under the rule of Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi and the country’s role within the geopolitical shifts reshaping the region. At the heart of the conversation will be the newly released book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, authored by Seif's brother Alaa Abdel-Fattah, one of the most high-profile political prisoners in Egypt. The book will be available for purchase at the event.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Sanaa Seif
Sanaa Seif is an Egyptian filmmaker, producer, and political activist. She has been imprisoned three times under the Sisi regime for her activism, most recently from the summer of 2020 until December 2021, when she was abducted by security forces after trying to get a letter in to her brother in prison. Hundreds of cultural figures and dozens of institutions campaigned for her release.

Sharif Abdel-Kouddous
Sharif Abdel Kouddous is an independent journalist based in Cairo. For eight years he worked as a producer and correspondent for the TV/radio news hour Democracy Now! In 2011, he returned to Egypt to cover the revolution. Since then, he has reported for a number of print and broadcast outlets from across the region. He received an Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media for his coverage of the Egyptian revolution and an Emmy award for his coverage of the Donald Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban. He is currently an editor and reporter at Mada Masr, Egypt's leading independent media outlet.

This event is co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University.​

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In-person and online via Zoom
Encina Commons Room 123
615 Crothers Way, Stanford, CA

Sanaa Seif Political Activist
Sharif Abdel Kouddous Journalist
Lectures
Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker Series

Civil and Human Rights: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy

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SPICE recommends the use of a 13-minute lecture—titled “Civil and Human Rights: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy” by Dr. Clayborne Carson—for use at the high school and college levels. Dr. Carson is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor Emeritus at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, FSI, at Stanford University. In the video lecture, Professor Carson not only discusses Martin Luther King, Jr. as a civil rights leader but also examines his larger vision of seeing the African American struggle as a worldwide struggle for citizenship rights and human rights.

A free classroom-friendly discussion guide for this video is available for download on the website above. The organizing questions that are listed in the guide are:

  • What are civil and human rights?
  • What were the significant achievements of the Civil Rights Movement?
  • What is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy in terms of civil and human rights?
  • How are Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision, ideas, and leadership still relevant today?
  • How is the American Civil Rights Movement similar and different from other rights-related movements?


SPICE also recommends the resources on the following websites for use in classrooms.

  • The World House Project works to realize Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of the world as a large house in which “we must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.” Dr. Carson is the director of the Project.

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SPICE recommends the use of a short lecture—titled “Civil and Human Rights: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy” by Dr. Clayborne Carson—for high school and college levels.

Marisa Kellam

Encina Hall

616 Jane Stanford Way

Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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CDDRL Visiting Scholar, 2021-23
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Marisa Kellam researches the quality of democracy with a focus on Latin America and a growing interest in East Asia. Her research links institutional analysis to various governance outcomes in democracies along three lines of inquiry: political parties and coalitional politics; mass electoral behavior and party system change; and democratic accountability and media freedom. She has published her research in various peer-reviewed journals, including The British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Party Politics, Electoral Studies, and Political Communication. Originally from Santa Rosa, California, Marisa Kellam earned her Ph.D. in political science from UCLA and spent several years as an assistant professor at Texas A&M University. Since 2013, she has been Associate Professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, where she also served as Director of the English-based degree programs for the School of Political Science & Economics. Currently she is a steering committee member for the V-Dem Regional Center for East Asia.

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President Biden Nominates Dr. Clayborne Carson to Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board

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In his latest round of nominations, President Biden nominated FSI's MLK, Jr. Centennial Professor Emeritus Dr. Clayborne Carson to the Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board.

As noted in the nomination accouncement from the White House, Dr. Carson has devoted most of his professional life to the study of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the movements King inspired. Since receiving his doctorate from UCLA in 1975, Dr. Carson has taught at Stanford University, where he is Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor of History (Emeritus).

In 1985, the late Coretta Scott King invited Dr. Carson to direct a long-term project to edit and publish the authoritative edition of her late husband’s speeches, sermons, correspondence, publications, and unpublished writings. Under Carson’s direction, the King Papers Project has produced seven volumes of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. In 2005 Carson founded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute to endow and expand the educational outreach of the King Papers Project.

I’m very fortunate to have lived during a period when I could make at least a small contribution to the Black Freedom Movement and then make a contribution to making sure that those who made larger contributions have gradually gotten their due.
Clayborne Carson
MLK, Jr. Centennial Professor Emeritus, FSI

Carson is mindful of the unique arc of his academic and personal life. "I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico where we were one of only three Black families. What I knew about Black America was mainly what I read in the newspapers. I read about these heroic figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Moses, Diane Nash, and John Lewis, and I wanted to be like them. I went to the March on Washington as a nineteen-year-old and watched and listened to what these leaders were working to accomplish. One of the remarkable things about my life is that I've been able to meet and get to know so many of the people who spoke or performed at the march or were on the speaker's platform at the Lincoln Memorial."

Dr. Carson is currently completing his final year as the director of the King Institute, afterwhich he will continue his research and teaching at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

As Carson looks towards the future, he's appreciative of the opportunities ahead. "I’m still excited about the idea of exploring little known aspects of African-American history, so that should be good preparation for studying largely forgotten 'cold cases,'" he says.

Dr. Clayborne Carson

Clayborne Carson

MLK, Jr. Centennial Professor Emeritus, FSI
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Welcoming Dr. Clayborne Carson to CDDRL

We are delighted to welcome Dr. Clayborne Carson as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor Emeritus at FSI.
Welcoming Dr. Clayborne Carson to CDDRL
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News

What Protests For Racial Justice Tell Us About U.S. Democracy

American democracy is facing its most serious challenge in decades, says Larry Diamond on the World Class Podcast. But there are signs of hope.
What Protests For Racial Justice Tell Us About U.S. Democracy
police brutality
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New Research from the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab Examines Police Brutality

For the last 10 years, a team of social scientists at the Poverty, Violence, and Governance (PovGov) lab at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) have been developing action-oriented research to support human rights and inform policy on the root causes and devastating consequences of violence.
New Research from the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab Examines Police Brutality
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In his new role on the Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board, Dr. Carson, a seminal scholar on the life and writing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., will review dozens of unsolved and racially motivated murder cases from the civil rights era.

Reassessing American Democracy: The Enduring Challenge of Racial Exclusion

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American democracy is in trouble. Since the 2016 election, a sizable literature has developed that focuses on diagnosing and assessing the state of American democracy, most of which concludes that our system of government is in decline.[2] These authors point to the rise in party polarization, the increasingly bipartisan abandonment of the norms of the democratic process, the rise of populism, the degradation of the public sphere, and the proliferation of gerrymandered districts and voting restrictions to illustrate the breakdown. And while attributing varying levels of significance to these factors, a common theme is that American democracy, once stable, is now threatened. On closer observation, however, it is unclear that American democracy was ever really as healthy as it may have appeared. This Essay argues that the stability of the American system has always been built and dependent upon racial exclusion; over the course of our history, each major movement toward a more fully representative participatory democracy has prompted a backlash that was resolved only by the adoption of policies that worked to undermine the full citizenship of communities of color. The point of this reframing is not to suggest that the United States has made no progress over its history. Nor does it diminish the accomplishments of those who have advocated for equality over the course of our history or minimize the importance of working to repair our democratic institutions. Rather, this reframing is necessary to avoid romanticizing our democratic history and to inform the choices in this moment as we seek to stabilize our country.

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Michigan Law Review Online
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Johanna Kalb
Didi Kuo

Lebanon’s Uprising in A Time of Crises

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This talk examines the multiple crises manifesting in Lebanon today and their impact on the fate of the uprising that began in October 2019. While the currency, fiscal, and infrastructural crises were central to the making of Lebanon’s uprising, the novel strategic innovations that the protesters made were key to shaping its trajectory relative to past protests. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has both exacerbated existing dynamics while also providing respite to the government and some of the traditional political parties. The presentation therefore engages these complexities to take stock of the current status of popular mobilizations, elite efforts to contain them, and the economic structures that undergird both.

SPEAKER BIO

ziad abu rish
Ziad Abu-Rish is Assistant Professor of History at Ohio University, where he is founding director of the Middle East & North Africa Studies Certificate Program. His research explores state formation, economic development, and popular mobilizations in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Lebanon and Jordan. Abu-Rish is co-editor of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (2012). He currently serves as Senior Editor at Arab Studies Journal, co-editor at Jadaliyya e-zine, and board member of the Lebanese Studies Association. He is also a Research Fellow at the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS).

Online, via Zoom: REGISTER

Ziad Abu-Rish Ohio University

Reconciliations, Settlements, and the Making of Syria’s Illiberal Peace

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ABSTRACT

The absence of an internationally mandated or internally negotiated peace process has allowed the Syrian regime to craft an illiberal peace as an outcome to the nearly decade-long conflict. This illiberal peace is shaped through a politics of exclusion in which Syrian society is bifurcated into the loyal and disloyal through processes of reconciliation, settlement, and new legal regimes of citizenship. These forms of ‘peace’ are productive of new forms of post-conflict citizenship in Syria structured around loyalty to the regime that also serve to punish anyone suspected of betraying ‘the homeland’. The division of society into the loyal and disloyal is being consecrated in new laws and practices that are shaping Syria’s post-conflict trajectory. The prospect of a progressive Syrian future that motivated many of the early protestors has been quelled by the circumscription of political space and the reinvigoration of pre-conflict forms of governance underpinned by violence and exclusion. The emergence of new forms of citizenship shaped by illiberal peace is determining the terrain of politics in Syria today.  

 

SPEAKER BIO

samer abboud headshot web
Samer Abboud is Associate Professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University. He is the author of Syria (Polity 2018) as well as a number of journal articles and book chapters on Syria. He has published in journals such as Security Dialogue, Citizenship Studies, Middle East Policy, and New Political Science and is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Syrian Studies at St. Andrew’s University, Scotland.  

Online, via Zoom: REGISTER

Samer Abboud Villanova University
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Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker Series
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