What is Hamas? History, politics and relation to other jihadist movements

Somdeep Sen, Associate Professor of International Development Studies at Roskilde University. Author of Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial (Cornell University Press, 2020) and co-editor of Globalizing Collateral Language: From 9/11 to Endless Wars (University of Georgia Press, 2021). His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Al Jezeera English, Foreign Policy, The Huffington Post, Open Democracy, Jacobin, The London Review of Books, The Palestine Chronicle and The Disorder of Things.

CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS: Erik Skare, PhD from the University of Oslo in 2020 and M.A. in Arabic. Postdoctoral researcher at the Center for International Studies (CERI), Sciences Po. Skare is specialised in Palestinian history and the Palestinian resistance. Author of publications such as A History of Palestinian Islamic Jihad: Faith, Awareness, and Revolution in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Palestinian Islamic Jihad: Islamist Writings on Resistance and Religion (I. B. Tauris, 2021) and Digital Jihad: Palestinian Resistance in the Digital Era (Zed Books, 2016).
NEW SPEAKER: Lars Erslev Andersen, Senior Researcher at DIIS, Migration and global order

Jeroen Gunning, Professor of Middle Eastern Politics and Conflict Studies based at King's College, London. He is one of the founders of the field of critical terrorism studies and his research focuses on political contestation in the Middle East, with a specific focus on the interplay between social movements, religion, electoral politics, repression, violence and structural change. He is one of the world's leading scholars on the politics of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas and co-director of the research project ‘Bringing in the Other Islamists - comparing Arab Shia and Sunni Islamism(s) in a sectarianised Middle East’. His publications include Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence (Hurst/CUP 2007/2008).

Mona Kanwal Sheikh, Senior Researcher and Head of Unit at DIIS. Her main expertise is the worldviews of militant Islamist movements, and she has worked comparatively on different variants of Islamism since 2005. Her research focuses on religious legitimisations of, and mobilisation for, violence. Sheikh also deals with the dynamics of transnational jihad, including Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and is heading an ERC project on the transnationalisation and containment of jihadism. Theoretically, Sheikh has helped develop a sociotheological approach to the study of religious violence, an approach to worldview-conflicts, and contributed to the securitisation theory's conceptualisation of religion.