In this episode of Occupied Thoughts, FMEP Non-Resident Fellow Nour Joudah speaks with Philip Proudfoot and Mahdi Zaidan from the Accountability Archive (@archivegenocide), which describes itself as a “crowdsourced record of journalists, politicians, and public figures endorsing or encouraging the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and/or defaming pro-Palestinian activists.” The trio discuss how the archive came about, how it is coming along, and plans for the future, as well as what it has been like to undertake both such a massive project as well as the experience of wading through such incredibly graphic material.
Recorded August 21, 2024
Nour Joudah is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA and a former President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at UC-Berkeley (2022-23). Dr. Joudah completed her PhD in Geography at UCLA (2022), and wrote her dissertation Mapping Decolonized Futures: Indigenous Visions for Hawaii and Palestine on the efforts by Palestinian and native Hawaiian communities to imagine and work toward liberated futures while centering indigenous duration as a non-linear temporality. Her work examines mapping practices and indigenous survival and futures in settler states, highlighting how indigenous countermapping is a both cartographic and decolonial praxis. She also has a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and wrote her MA thesis on the role and perception of exile politics within the Palestinian liberation struggle, in particular among politically active Palestinian youth living in the United States and occupied Palestine.
Philip Proudfoot is co-founder of the Accountability Archive and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. As well as having a long activist history, Philip is also an academic where his work has focused on issues connected to de-development, forced migration, gender and sexuality, humanitarianism, protracted conflict, and populist mass movements. He is currently working on a new book about the (end of) humanitarianism, activism, and the rise of impunity.
Mahdi Zaidan a trustee and co-founder of the Accountability Archive, a crowdsourced initiative dedicated to collecting statements that call for and endorse the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the defamation of their supporters. He is also a researcher at the Institute of Development Studies and a doctoral candidate at King’s College London’s Department of Geography, studying the political economy and ecology of post-oil infrastructure in the Middle East. Mahdi previously held the William Wyse studentship as an MPhil student in Social Anthropology at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, where he wrote on the history and politics of urban development and infrastructure in post-war Lebanon. Mahdi has a second MA from Georgetown University’s Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies where he studied humanitarian and political activism among refugees from Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Jordan. Mahdi has worked as an analyst and researcher with a number of organisations in the development sector such as Search for Common Ground, HIVOS, and the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre in Washington DC.