Publications

At the end of the conference held at the Bruno Kreisky Forum in November 2023, titled „Women’s lives and agency in the MENAT Region - between political activism and realism“, women from various countries and backgrounds were invited to illuminate their contexts, socio-economic and political developments, and violence – particularly gender-based violence – during wartime and its impact on women’s lives, engagement, and agency. With the rise of populism and reactionary movements, women's rights appear to necessitate renegotiation. As a consequence of polarisation and ambivalence, listening to and understanding women from the MENAT region is becoming less important.
In many Western countries, a dominant perception of the lives and work of women in the MENAT region prevails, and a knowledge deficit compared to other regions of the world, e.g. Latin America, still exists. The book aims to give female political actors from the region a face and a name by using biographical essays as a method of knowledge production and awareness-raising, while promoting synergies and advocating the need for networking and cooperation.

„This book presents eleven biographies from seven different countries, featuring individuals from diverse generations, backgrounds, and areas of engagement. In their biographies, the contributors delve into the political developments of their countries and the region over recent decades. Historical political phases, such as the end of colonial rule and the ensuing period of independence in Tunisia, the era of Ba'athist rule and the war in Syria, or the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 and the ongoing wars and displacement of Palestinians, are embodied in the lives of the women narrators and how these phases have shaped and continue to shape their lives and work.” Viola Raheb, Co-Editor

On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue, the supplement ARMBRUSTERGASSE 15 appeared in FALTER on 22 September 2021.

Our founding and honorary president Franz Vranitzky tells the story of the forum, while historian Oliver Rathkolb, co-founder and member of the scientific advisory board of the Kreisky Forum, recounts the history of the house. The great philosopher Franz Schuh pays tribute to the man and statesman Bruno Kreisky. And a photographic retrospective looks back at the many marvellous events and speakers of the last 30 years.

You are welcome to request the brochure from us. Please send us an email: kreiskyforum@kreisky-forum.org!

And now: Enjoy browsing.

Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond

Edited by Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh
Columbia University Press
Nineteenth-century Europe turned the political status of its Jewish communities into the “Jewish Question”, as both Christianity and rising forms of nationalism viewed Jews as the ultimate other. With the onset of Zionism, this “question” migrated to Palestine and intensified under British colonial rule and in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Zionism’s attempt to solve the “Jewish Question” created what came to be known as the “Arab Question”, which concerned the presence and rights of the Arab population in Palestine. For the most part, however, Jewish settlers denied or dismissed the question they created, to the detriment of both Arabs and Jews in Palestine and elsewhere.

This book brings together leading scholars to consider how these two questions are entangled historically and in the present day. It offers critical analyses of Arab engagements with the question of Jewish rights alongside Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish considerations of Palestinian identity and political rights. Together, the essays show that the Arab and Jewish questions, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which they have become subsumed, belong to the same thorny history. Despite their major differences, the historical Jewish and Arab questions are about the political rights of oppressed groups and their inclusion within exclusionary political communities-a question that continues to foment tensions in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Shedding new light on the intricate relationships among Orientalism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, colonialism, and the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this book reveals the inseparability of Arab and Jewish struggles for self-determination and political equality.

Contributors include Gil Anidjar, Brian Klug, Amal Ghazal, Ella Shohat, Hakem Al-Rustom, Hillel Cohen, Yuval Evri, Derek Penslar, Jacqueline Rose, Moshe Behar, Maram Masarwi, and the editors, Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh.

About the Author
Bashir Bashir is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at the Open University of Israel, and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He is co-editor of The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies (2008) and The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia, 2018).

Leila Farsakh is associate professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her books include Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land, and Occupation, second edition (2012).

Publication Date: December 2020
ISBN: 9780231199216
320 Pages
Format: Paperback
List Price: $£35.00£27.00

Mapping the Transformations in the Three Spheres of Influence: Israel, the Region, and the International
Published by Palestine Strategy Group

The Palestine Strategy Group (PSG), partner of the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue, convenes meetings, focus groups, develops strategic analysis, scenario planning and provides a forum for debate on policy and future direction. PSG has been busy working towards the publication and launch of the ‘Palestine 2030 – A Decade of Clarity and Renewal’ report.

‘Palestine 2030’ builds on twelve specially commissioned research papers and several in-person workshops that analyse the Palestinian issue through the lens of the changing Israeli, regional and international contexts. The report provides up-to-date insights into the contemporary realities of the Palestinian struggle for freedom within this changing environment and offers options, scenarios and pathways towards rejuvenating Palestinian morale and a peaceful settlement of the conflict.

The report is a collective output, enriched by feedback received from round-table participants throughout the drafting process, including Palestinian academic, political and civil society leaders from the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, as well as from the Refugee and Diaspora Communities.

The report was launched on 30 June 2020.

A New Grammar of Trauma and History
Edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg.
Foreword by Elias Khoury. Afterword by Jacqueline Rose.

In this groundbreaking book, leading Arab and Jewish intellectuals examine how and why the Holocaust and the Nakba are interlinked, without blurring the fundamental differences between them. While these two foundational tragedies are often discussed separately and in abstraction from the constitutive global historical contexts of nationalism and colonialism, The Holocaust and the Nakba explores the historical, political, and cultural intersections between them. The majority of the contributors argue that these intersections are embedded in cultural imaginations, colonial and asymmetrical power relations, realities, and structures. Focusing on them paves the way for a new political, historical, and moral grammar that enables a joint Arab-Jewish dwelling and supports historical reconciliation in Israel/Palestine.

This book does not seek to draw a parallel or comparison between the Holocaust and the Nakba, nor to merely inaugurate a “dialogue” between them. Instead, it searches for a new historical and political grammar for relating and narrating their complicated intersections. The book features prominent international contributors, including a foreword by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury on the centrality of the Holocaust and the Nakba in humanity's essential struggle against racism, and an afterword by literary scholar Jacqueline Rose on the challenges and contributions of linking the Holocaust and the Nakba for power to shift and for a world of justice and equality to be created between the two peoples. The Holocaust and the Nakba is the first extended and collective scholarly treatment in English of these two constitutive traumas together.

Columbia University Press
November 2018
ISBN: 9780231182973

REFLECTIONS FROM EUROPE

Edited by Anthony Lerman

‘Belonging’ is both a fundamental human emotion and a political project that affects millions. Since its foundation in 1957, the European Union has encouraged people across its member states to feel a sense of belonging to one united community, with mixed results. Today, faced with the fracturing impacts of the migration crisis, the threat of terrorism and rising tensions within countries, governments within and outside the EU seek to impose a different kind of belonging on their populations through policies of exclusion and bordering.
In this collection of original essays, a diverse group of novelists, journalists and academics reflect on their own individual senses of European belonging. In creative and disarming ways, they confront the challenges of nationalism, populism, racism and fundamentalism.
Do I Belong? offers fascinating insights into such questions as: Why fear growing diversity? Is there a European identity? Who determines who belongs? Is a single sense of ‘good’ belonging in Europe dangerous? This collection provides a unique commentary on an insufficiently understood but defining phenomenon of our age.
Authors include: Zia Haider Rahman, Goran Rosenberg, Isolde Charim, Hanno Loewy, Diana Pinto, Nira Yuval-Davis and Doron Rabinovici, among others.

Pluto Press London
May 2017
ISBN: 9780745399959

A Two-Day International Conference Birkbeck, University of London

Independent Jewish Voice in collaboration with the
Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue

Conference aims:

• To help shift the debate from externally imposed or brokered state-centric solutions to the building of a new campaign in Palestine-Israel and internationally to achieve full civil and political rights.
• To provide a forum for like-minded Israeli Jews and Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, as well as their diasporic supporters, to engage in discussion of this new approach, with the participation of sympathetic politicians, policy-makers, think tank experts, activists and media.
• To provide a new focus of activity for activists outside of Palestine-Israel, which would lead to building new, more powerful and united coalitions within activist communities, and especially among concerned groups and individuals in the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas.

To mark the 15th anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) and as a contribution to the Beijing+20 campaign by UN Women, the symposium “Enhancing Women’s Share in Peace and Security” took place in Vienna from 3 to 4 November 2014. The recommendations generated at this symposium are now available in a dedicated publication by the Federal Ministry of Defence and Sport and the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue.

Document type:
Conference Papers
Editors: Ursula Hann, Astrid Holzinger
Publisher: Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue
ISBN: 978-3-9503890-1-2
Pages: 132

Partition and its Alternatives

Editors Bashir Bashir and Azar Dakwar
S&D Group in the European Parliament/Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue
Vienna 2014
ISBN: 978-3-950-0-5

This volume, published by the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue and the S&D Group in the European Parliament, edited by Bashir Bashir and Azar Dakwar, brings together the voices and views of leading Palestinian, Israeli Jewish and European intellectuals, politicians and activists, who propose alternative approaches and “out of the box” thinking on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More specifically, this unique volume aims to contribute to the emerging efforts of re-examining the current strategies and paradigms by proposing and exploring new perspectives, visionary discourses and alternatives to partition in the case of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Put differently, it seeks to enrich European public discourse with original and refreshing views and alternative paradigms for settling this lingering conflict.

We present the volume as a PDF download. To order the free cover version, please send an email to kreiskyforum@kreisky.org.

Confronting traumatic pasts: An international comparison
Edited by Ruth Wodak, Gertraud Auer Borea d’Olmo
Series Passages Society, published 2009

Every society must cope with traumatic pasts. The many ways in which societies cope with the past(s) form part of the „politics of the past“: history is thus continuously reformulated ex post facto and presented as a seemingly coherent narrative related to specific (hegemonic) interests.
The present volume summarises the contributions of 18 prominent scholars of an international interdisciplinary conference at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue, Vienna, in June 2008. Commemorative events, issues of guilt, justice and legitimation as well as forms of restitution were compared, analysed and discussed in respect to their functions, objectives and effects, while focussing their specifically national contexts of origin and their respective impact. Thus, the many dimensions of „remembering and forgetting“ were part and parcel of the theoretical and methodological presentations, on the one hand, and of specific national case studies (in Europe, South-Africa, South America (Chile), Israel, and so forth), on the other. Salient social phenomena such as war crimes and tribunals, the functions of ideologies and images of the past (Geschichtsbilder) were deconstructed and critically debated, always related to specific national and transnational contexts. It became obvious that the past(s) can never be silenced; and that they always impinge on the present and future of all societies - and our lives.

Robert Misik
Gertraud Auer Borea

The financial crisis has forcefully brought long-standing issues into sharp focus. Do we need new rules of play in the economy? Are the current problems eminent symptoms of a crisis?
Not only against the backdrop of the global financial and economic crisis does the question arise of what a world might look like in which social justice is once again given political significance.
Robert Misik, author of the bestseller “Genial dagegen” (Brilliantly against it), has invited political activists, social critics and critical scientists to record original thoughts against the political and economic mainstream: because social justice and economic prosperity are not mutually exclusive; in the long run, one cannot be had without the other. But what might a new welfare-state capitalism look like? What needs to be done to make the global economy more stable? How can more democracy be brought into our democracy?
With contributions from Robert Castel, Ève Chiapello, Colin Crouch, Heiner Flassbeck, James K. Galbraith, Eva Illouz, Katja Kipping, Jeremy Rifkin, Kurt W. Rothschild, Richard Sennett and Richard Wilkinson, among others.

About modern nomads
Isolde Charim / Gertraud Auer Borea (Eds.)

The dynamics of the global economy are generating increasingly borderless mobility. While locations can follow the pull of flexibility, the people caught within them remain bound to fixed, 'grounded' concepts of identity. However, our nation-state cultures lack the mental reserves for the lives of modern nomads.
This book – a kind of 'intellectual oil rig' – embarks on the search for such a resource. The contributions therefore start from the concept of diaspora – not as a synonym for suffering and displacement, but as a rich treasure trove of experience.
Global thinking, at the cutting edge.
With contributions by, among others, Benedict Anderson, Zygmunt Bauman, Homi K. Bhabha, Tony Judt and Gayatri C. Spivak.

Texts and Protocols on the Correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, Why War? 1933
Cathrin Pichler
A programme of the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue.

With contributions from Stephen Barber, Slavenka Drakulić, Raghavendra Gadagkar, Jochen Gerz, Mark Gisbourne, Gerhard Grössing, Moritz Leuenberger, Robert Jay Lifton, Sylvère Lotringer, Helga Nowotny, Anton Pelinka, Wolfgang Petritsch, Cathrin Pichler, Doron Rabinovici, Horst-Eberhard Richter, Yehuda E. Safran, Jean-Jacques Salomon, M. S. Swaminathan, Joseph Weizenbaum
The two letters exchanged by Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud in 1932, which were published in 1933 by the “Institut pour la Coopération Intellectuelle de la Société des Nations”, were described by Freud as “one of the last signals from the Euro-Jewish cosmopolitan world”. The authors, invited by Vienna's Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue, reflect on the positions in today's debate on the disposition towards war, the perspectives of pacifism, and the attempts to process the traumas of past and present wars.