Paper Short Abstract:

I draw on work in the International Coalition to Stop Genocide in Palestine to explore anthropological praxis as antifascist strategy. Our primary research product—itself inseparable from ethnographic process—must be determined through collective struggle rather than neoliberal academic dictates.

Paper Abstract:

Days before South Africa invoked the Genocide Convention against Israel at the International Court of Justice, a coalition had formed with the goal of mobilizing social movements to pressure states to do just that. By the time we held our first meeting, our focus had shifted to urging states file Declarations of Interventions in support of the South African case, and connecting them with the necessary legal and technical support to do so. Within two weeks, the International Coalition to Stop Genocide in Palestine had garnered signatures representing over 2,000 worldwide organizations (with a combined total membership of over half a billion people) on our initial call to action. Members have coordinated extensively on high-level diplomatic meetings, with dramatic, concrete results. Less than a month after our first meeting, our leadership has intentionally shifted from the U.S.-based antiimperialist activists who initiated the coalition, to major organizations representing the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and the Right to Return, and some of the largest and most militant antiimperialist, antifascist movements from the Global South.

I have previously argued that antifascist anthropologists’s primary research product—itself inseparable from the ethnographic process—must be determined through collective strategic processes rather than neoliberal academic dictates. While I am one of the original lead organizers of the ICSGP, my aim in this paper is not to center myself, but rather to articulate, using the ICSGP as a case study, the key roles that anthropological praxis can play in developing successful strategies to build global antifascist movements.