Emerging Worlds talk focuses on conflict in South Sudan

“Understanding Conflict in South Sudan,” the second in series of public events looking at global Islam, is set for Tuesday, February 10 at UC Santa Cruz.

Guest speaker for the free public event is Noah Salomon, assistant professor of religion at Carleton College, in Northfield Minn.  It begins at 6:30 p.m. in Room 75 of the Social Sciences 2 building on the UC Santa Cruz campus.

Sudan native Mark Fathi Massoud, UC Santa Cruz assistant professor of politics and legal studies, will moderate. Massoud has written widely about South Sudan, the world’s newest nation, a land where conflict continues again after more than 23 years of civil war ended in 2005

The series on global Islam is organized by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Emerging Worlds, launched in September within the Anthropology Department to address conflict, environmental challenges, resource competitions, and ethnic nationalist and religious tensions in the world. In addition to the Tuesday evening event, a seminar is planned for 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, “When the State is Everywhere: Rethinking the Islamic Public Sphere.”

Salomon teaches courses in Islamic Studies and theory and method in the study of religion.  He is currently working on a book that presents an ethnography of Sudan's experiment with an Islamic state from 1989 to the present, as well as a more recent project on state secularism and the construction of a Muslim minority in the new nation of South Sudan.  He is scheduled to read and discuss portions of his work during an additional seminar Thursday at 10 a.m.

Massoud is the author of  Law’s Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan, that examines how legal order and the rule of law develop in war-torn settings.