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JOIN TWO SCHOLARS UNIQUELY QUALIFIED to delve into the vexed topic of political violence. In her first book, Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons, BANU BARGU (UC Santa Cruz)explored the use of the body in self-destructive protest in the specific context of Turkish prisons through the ethnography of a radical movement. On the one hand, the book sought to bring into view a dark archive of Turkish democracy and the treatment of dissent in a country where prisons have become sites of political confrontation. On the other hand, utilizing the in-depth study of the Death Fast Struggle, the book sought to theorize the voluntary, protracted, and strategic deployment of self-destructive practices around the globe, practices which the author has called the weaponization of life. MURAD IDRIS (University of Virginia) is the author of War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought, which argues that dominant idealizations of peace in fact facilitate war, violence, and exclusion. He p rovides a critical language for understanding the history of peace as an ideal, how it blurs into war, and its links to other ideas like security, law, and religion. Moderated by ROXANNE EUBEN (Penn). Presented in partnership with the Middle East Center.

Banu Bargu's research brings together political theory, anthropology, philosophy, global history, and Middle East studies around questions of the body, power, violence, and resistance practices. As a political theorist, her main areas of focus are modern and contemporary political thought, poststructuralist and critical theory. She is the author of Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia University Press, 2014), which received APSA’s First Book Prize given by the Foundations of Political Theory section and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice. She is the editor of Turkey's Necropolitical Laboratory: Democracy, Violence, and Resistance (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and the co-editor of Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique: Essays in Honor of Nancy Fraser (Palgrave, 2017). Bargu has previously taught at The New School for Social Research, New York City, and SOAS, University of London. Her scholarship has been recognized by a number of fellowships, including the Mercator fellowship and the ACLS, and she was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, during 2020-2021.

Murad Idris has wide-ranging interests in political theory and the history of political thought, including war and peace, critical theory, conceptual history, anticolonial and postcolonial thought, political theology, international political theory, comparative political theory, and Arabic and Islamic political thought. Prof. Idris’s book, War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (2019), won the David Easton Award from APSA, and the International Ethics Best Book Award from ISA, and the Best Book in Interdisciplinary Studies Award also from ISA. He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (2020), with Leigh Jenco and Megan Thomas. He has written articles on “Kazanistan” in John Rawls’s Papers (winner of APSA’s Political Theory Best Paper Prize), the politics of comparison in political theory, Erasmus’s political theology, Ibn Tufayl’s reception history, Qasim Amin and empire, and the horizons of anticolonial thought. His work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Modern Intellectual History, European Journal of Political Theory, Political Theory, among others. He previously held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, the Department of Government at Cornell University, and the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Prior to joining Michigan, he was Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Roxanne Euben is a political theorist whose research has helped pioneer a new area of inquiry often referred to as “comparative political theory.” Euben’s special area of expertise and research is Muslim and  Euro-American political thought, and her scholarship has addressed such topics as Muslim cosmopolitanism;  jihad; martyrdom and political action; travel and translation; gender and humiliation; shared perspectives on  science and reason; the politics of visual and verbal rhetorics; and digital time. She is the author of Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton, 1999), Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge, (Princeton, 2006), and Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from Al-Banna to Bin Laden (Princeton, 2009), written and edited in collaboration with Muhammad Qasim Zaman. She has been published across a wide spectrum of scholarly journals, including Perspectives on Politics, Political Theory, The Review of Politics, The Journal of Politics, International Studies Review, and Political Psychology. Euben's honors include fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation (2016-17), the National Endowment for the Humanities (2012-13), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2004-5), the American Council of Learned Societies (2000-1) and the Mellon Foundation (2002), and her work was awarded the Frank L. Wilson Best American Political Science Association Paper Prize (2005).