Ilan Pappe to give #BISA2026 public lecture on Gaza as an epicentre
We are excited to announce that our #BISA2026 conference in Brighton will commence with a public lecture given by Professor Ilan Pappe (University of Exeter) on the evening of Tuesday 2 June 2026. The title of Professor Pappe’s lecture will be ‘Gaza as an epicentre - the breakdown of the international order’ and it will take place at The Brighton Centre. All are welcome to attend, whether attending the BISA main conference or not, but it is essential to register due to limited space. Free registration is available on the event page.
The lecture will attempt to provide an explanation why the events in the Gaza Strip since October 2023 unsettled the international order. The events there in that period exposed the crisis of confidence in the non-Western world towards the allegedly universal institutions, systems of justice and political guidelines established after the second world war. A crisis born out of the continued exceptionalism in the Western engagement with crises in the global south in general and in Palestine in particular. This a twofold deep fracture that threatens civilizations all over the globe: the an ever growing gap between elites' agendas and concerns and that of their societies and the return of what Eric Hobsbawm called "the Age of Extremes" that in its previous cycle began with the age of catastrophe (1914-1945).
As an epicentre, Gaza exposed this crisis, but also holds a certain promise for moving to a different age, as had been done before after ages of extremes and catastrophe, to an age Pappe would call "the age of sobering wisdom" and one of its multiple epicentres would be Gaza and Palestine.
Our speaker, Professor Ilan Pappe, is the director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter and a senior fellow at the University of Exeter's Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies. He is also the chair of the board of the charity The Nakba Memorial Foundation.
Ilan Pappe was born in Haifa in 1954. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1984. From 1984 to 2006, Pappe taught at the University of Haifa and moved to the UK in 2007 to the University of Exeter.
Pappe has written 26 books to date, among them The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007) and On Palestine (jointly with Noam Chomsky in 2010). His most recent books are The Ten Myths of Israel (2018), The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Israeli Occupation (2019), Our Vision for Liberation (with Ramzy Baroud 2022) and Lobbying for Zionism on both sides of the Atlantic (2024). His latest book is Israel on the Brink (2025).
The public lecture is co-sponsored by the University of Brighton's Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE).
At the BISA conference you can join a dynamic community of specialists from around the world to discuss, debate, and advance the field of international studies. It is taking place in Brighton from 3-5 June 2026, and registration is open now.
Image by Jaber Jehad Badwan licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence.
