IPRG special guest lecturer - Dr Vera Vesela, "Not Our Enemy? Rethinking the Islamist Challenge"

IPRG is pleased to announce an upcoming special guest lecturer. Dr Vera Vesela, Research Fellow at the Institute of International Relations, Prague, visited the Department to speak on "Not Our Enemy? Rethinking the Islamist Challenge". Her lecture took place in the Main Hall of the International Politics Building on 25 October.

Abstract of talk: This talk used the example of the Islamist phenomenon to reflect on a conceptual framework commonly employed to study international relations and international conflict. For this purpose, existing IR scholarship on the Islamist and terrorist groupings was compared with conceptualizations of Islamists and their relationship to politics in Afghanistan and Central Asia. 

Short bio: Vera Vesela (née Exnerova) is Research Fellow at Prague Institute of International Relations. She holds PhD from Charles University and was Visiting Fellow at Institut Français d’Etudes sur l’Asie Centrale (2007, 2008), Harvard Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (2005-2006) and Moscow State University (2000, 2002). She worked and lived in Afghanistan in 2007-2008 and has carried out research on different aspects of relationship of Islam and politics in Central Asia and Afghanistan since 2000 until today. Her publications on this theme include "Islam as Ideology and Tactic - Afghanistan and Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective", in: The Global 1989: International and Transnational Connections in a Revolutionary World, Central European University Press (2011, forthcoming), or  Afghan Islamists - Do They Need the Global War on Terror?, in: Beranek O. (ed). The World after the War on Terror: Impacts on the US, EU, and the Middle East, , I.B. Tauris (2012, forthcoming).