UNE’s Ali Ahmida discusses book in European University Institute workshop

Ali Ahmida, Ph.D., professor in UNE’s Political Science programs, recently discussed his latest book in a virtual multidisciplinary workshop with the Max Weber Programme (MWP) for Postdoctoral Studies at the European University Institute.

This MWP multidisciplinary workshop aims to explore strategies, processes, and narratives through which Western gazes have contributed to the creation and making of the Global South.

The workshop critically examines the ways in which knowledge is produced on Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American regions.

On April 15, Ahmida was interviewed by MWP Fellow Roberta Biasillo about his book, “Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History,” which was released last August.

The book recovers the hidden history of fascist Italian concentration camps in Libya between 1929 and 1934 through Libyan survivors’ oral testimonies, which took over 10 years of fieldwork to collect. It links the Libyan genocide through cross-cultural and comparative readings to the colonial roots of Holocaust and genocide studies. It provides a new and original history of the genocide and is a key resource for readers interested in genocide and holocaust studies, colonial and post-colonial studies, and African and Middle Eastern studies.

Ahmida is an expert on North African and Libyan relations. He regularly gives interviews on Libyan affairs and, most recently, was invited to join the Special Commission on Social Science Research in the Middle East and North Africa, an initiative of the Research Ethics Committee in the Middle East and North Africa (REMENA) project at Columbia University, which is dedicated to developing guidelines for the conduct of responsible, ethical, and social inquiry.