The Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies Presents

BOOK LAUNCH:
Dr. Ardi Imseis’ The United Nations and the Question of Palestine

11 January 2024
5:30 PM Reception | 6 PM Doors Open
Location: Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre

DESCRIPTION:

Join the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies for the launch of Dr. Ardi Imseis’ incisive new book, The United Nations and the Question of Palestine. In this talk, Dr. Imseis will detail how, contrary to conventional wisdom, there has been a continuing though vacillating gulf between the requirements of international law and the UN on the question of Palestine. This book explores the UN’s management of the longest-running problem on its agenda, critically assessing tensions between the organization’s position and international law. What forms has the UN’s failure to respect international law taken, and with what implications? The author critically interrogates the received wisdom regarding the UN’s fealty to the international rule of law, in favour of what is described as an international rule by law. This book demonstrates that through the actions of the UN, Palestine and its people have been committed to a state of what the author calls ‘international legal subalternity’, according to which the promise of justice through international law is repeatedly proffered under a cloak of political legitimacy furnished by the international community, but its realization is interminably withheld.

BIO:

Ardi Imseis is Assistant Professor and Academic Director in International Law Programs at Queen’s University. He is interested in the intersection of power, politics, law, and justice, and the practical impact of those phenomena on international relations in general and on underrepresented peoples in particular. He joined the Queen’s Faculty of Law in 2018, following a 12-year career as a UN official in the Middle East, first with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and then with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Since leaving the UN, Imseis has continued to engage in high-level public advocacy on international law, peace and security, including a number of invited addresses to the UN Security Council. Between 2019-2021, Imseis was appointed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to serve as a Member of the Group of Eminent International and Regional Experts, a commission of inquiry mandated by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate and report on violations of human rights and humanitarian law in the conflict in Yemen. He serves as the Academic Director of the International Law Programs that Queen’s Law offers at Bader College, Herstmonceux Castle, East Sussex, United Kingdom.

Professor Imseis’s scholarship has appeared in, inter alia, the American Journal of International Law, the Berkeley Journal of International Law, the Harvard International Law Journal, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, and the University of British Columbia Law Review. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Third World Approaches to International Law Review. He is former Editor-in-Chief of the Palestine Yearbook of International Law (2008-2019), Visiting Research Scholar, Department of Law, American University in Cairo and Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and Human Rights Fellow, Columbia Law School. Between 2010 and 2011, he served as Senior Legal Counsel to the Honourable Catherine A. Fraser, Chief Justice of Alberta.