A Nation At The Crossroads

A Roundtable Reflecting upon the IASH 2025-26 Theme ‘Making a Nation’

2025 marks the confluence of multiple significant milestones within canonical liberal traditions regarding state-making and national independence. While there always were important lacunae within the narrative and practices of state-making in the ‘Western state hemisphere’ - to say nothing of those across the community of Commonwealth states, which celebrate their own centenary this year - the need to explore overlooked or marginalised dimensions of state-making practice gains heightened relevance in the context of a tangible fraying of the post-WWII rules-based order; additionally, the rise of neo-populism and the collapse of the liberal centre that had previously provided foundational undergirding to liberal state-making narratives and practices merit consideration.

Nowhere are these tensions felt more intensely than in Palestine today, where the Gaza genocide raises profound questions regarding the extent of the liberal collapse and what its implications are for the Palestinians and other regional players, as well as for the very ideals and international system that once claimed to uphold these values.

While the quest for Palestinian national self-determination has seen the world entertain its recognition for more than a century, the actual practice of national liberation remains elusive. Indeed, it may be in genuine danger of being eliminated in light of the genocide. This remarkable incongruence begs the question as to how this state of affairs emerged, and how Palestinians and others have attempted to defy it. Questions related to various agentive forms of cultural and social resistance have also resurfaced, particularly the revisiting of the conventional definition of archives and documentation in a state-less context.

This roundtable explores the question of Palestine in its current juncture at the crossroads of genocide, statehood recognition and liberation. It explores how ‘making a nation’ in the Palestinian context has entailed both making and unmaking ‘the case’ for Palestine and what this entails in terms of various acts of centring, framing, and performing.

This event brings together an interdisciplinary group of Palestine scholars to explore the politics, practice and impediments to state-making in a broader context of the liberal state paradigm and in the shadow of its demise.

This event is organised by a cluster of Palestine Studies researchers associated with the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.