Development Days 2025 Public Forum: Critical perspectives on wars, mal/development and liberation in the global Middle East

The event is organized by the University of Eastern Finland, the Finnish University Partnership for International Development and Finnish Society for Development Research. The speakers are Associate Professor Alina Sajed (McMaster University), and Visiting Professor Ali Kadri (Sun Yat-Sen University) and Researcher Antti Tarvainen (Finnish Institute in the Middle East). The event will be moderated by Lili De Paola. The event is free of charge and open for all. It is a part of the Development Days 2025 conference.

Across the globe, challenges related to mal/development, wars and liberation are intertwined with global capitalism, militarism and geopolitics. This is also evident in the Middle East, where decades of conflict(s) have exposed the intricate intersections of war, development and societal transformation(s). Simultaneously, decolonization movements underscore the critical role of intersectionality as ways to imagine and achieve liberation.

This discussion aims to unpack the connections between liberation and decolonization, with a focus on drawing from perspectives of waste, wars and maldevelopment. The speakers explore how these dimensions interplay with gender, agency, and societal structures, particularly highlighting the gendered dynamics and liberation movements. By situating the discussion within the broader context of global capitalism and geopolitics, this conversation seeks to analyze how these forces have influenced development transitions in the Middle East. By addressing both structural and individual dimensions, the discussion seeks to foster an intersectional dialogue that connects the concepts of development and liberation.

Speakers

Alina Sajed is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University. Her expertise lies in the area of politics of the Global South, focusing particularly on the challenges of decolonization, and on the political, social and economic challenges of post-independence societies; Third Worldism and development policies; with a regional focus on North Africa and Middle East. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles on these topics. She is also the author of Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations. The Politics of Transgression in the Maghreb (Routledge, 2013), and the co-author (with William D. Coleman) of Fifty Key Thinkers on Globalization (Routledge, 2012). She is the co-editor (with Randolph B. Persaud) of Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations. Postcolonial Perspectives (Routledge, 2018). She is a recipient of McMaster’s 2022 President’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision. She is also the recipient (with Timothy Seidel) of the 2024 International Studies Association’s Theory Award for her guest-edited special issue on “Anticolonial Connectivity and the Politics of Solidarity” published by Postcolonial Studies in February 2023.

Visiting Professor Ali Kadri is a leading scholar specializing in the political economy and development economics of the Middle East, North Africa, and East Asia. He currently teaches at Sun Yat-sen University. Previously, he was a senior research fellow at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. He has also been affiliated with the London School of Economics as senior fellow at its Laboratory for Advanced Research on the Global Economy and a visiting fellow at its Department of International Development. Before rejoining the academia, he worked for a decade at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UN ESCWA) in Lebanon, where he served as head of its Economic Analysis Section.

Antti Tarvainen is a doctoral researcher in global development studies at the University of Helsinki. His research focuses on the entanglements of innovation economy and settler colonialism in ‘Silicon Palestine’: the shifting frontiers of technological innovation and risk capital that bring Israel, the Occupied Palestinian territories, and spaces like San Francisco and Dubai into interplay. The research project develops a reading of ‘innovation ’ not as a universal economic form but as a site of political struggle, friction, and creativity inherently linked to settler colonialism. Antti will defend his PhD monograph in 2025.

Lili De Paola holds a master's degree in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Helsinki. She is particularly familiar with Palestine and Israel and the intersections of economy, gender and nationalism in modern Saudi Arabia.