10 Sept 2021
No Women No Peace Ep 3: Humanitarianism w/ Julie Billaud & Claudia Seymour
Julie Billaud is a legal and political anthropologist who has held positions in the United Kingdom (University of Sussex), France (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) and Germany (Humboldt University and Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) prior to joining the Graduate Institute, Geneva in 2019. She is the author of Kabul Carnival: Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan (2015, Pennsylvania University Press).
After her PhD, she redirected her attention to Islam in Europe and the contemporary transformations of the European public sphere through its encounter with Islamic difference. Based on fieldwork in London in shariah councils, law firms specializing in Islamic law, the 2013 World Islamic Economic Forum, and the flourishing Muslim marriage industry, the research documents everyday practices of Islamic law in Britain. It highlights how state interventions participate in contradictory ways in the making of a legal field, which is both embraced for its commercial potential and contested due to its supposed discrimination against women. More generally, the study explores notions of morality, citizenship and multiculturalism from the standpoint of these emerging religious claims.
More recently, she collaborated with Jane Cowan (University of Sussex) on an ethnographic study of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a mechanism of human rights monitoring within the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Drawing inspiration from the anthropological literature on international organizations, bureaucracy and audit cultures, the study examines the interactions, knowledge practices, institutional codes and norms, and documentation processes embedded in this complex assemblage of administrative procedures, technologies and transnational actors.
From February 2016 until February 2018, she was hired by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva to carry out an ethnographic study of its “diplomatic culture”. The study explores the negotiations practices of delegates who seek to implement the mandate of the ICRC as “guardian of the Geneva conventions”.
She is also the co-Founder and Editor of 'Allegra Lab' (allegralaboratory.net)
Claudia Seymour is an applied social researcher with more than 20 years of experience, working primarily in conflict-affected environments. Her research specializations include youth, protection, resilience to violence, and the ethics of international engagement. She has extensive experience working with the United Nations and as a research consultant for a range of international NGOs and think tanks, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. She is a trainer in protection and human rights and a lecturer and convenor in MA courses on the political economy of violence, conflict management, and the ethics of international engagement.
Her current research project, ‘Balancing on the margins: young people’s pathways to engaging with/transforming violence,’ is a comparative interdisciplinary inquiry into how young people cope with and make sense of violence, drawing on mixed methods including ethnography, narratives, and the practice of yoga and pranayama. She is the author of The Myth of International Protection: War and Survival in Congo, published by the University of California Press in 2019. Claudia is a Senior Researcher with the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva) and a Research Associate at the Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London).
She welcomes scholars and practitioners to engage in conversation about transformative social action in her blog #actionsofoureveryday : www.claudiaseymour.net/blog.
