This conference aims to rethink the history of the left, its unrealized trajectories, and its failure during the global crisis of the 1970s through a comparative and multidisciplinary perspective (political economy, sociology, history). It will address the strategy of political organizations, the attempts at planning on the scale of socialist states, and the various forms of opposition generated against this global transnational movement.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno served as UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping between 2000 and 2008 and led the biggest expansion of peacekeeping in the history of the United Nations. He is now Director of the Kent Global Leadership Program on Conflict Resolution and a Professor of Practice at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

A conversation to bring together contemporary Palestinian and Northern Irish writers will be held at the Middle East Centre. The symposium aims to explore ways that literature allows for an engagement with the legacies of the writers' societies’ traumatic past whilst they navigate the present world in their socio-political contexts. Moderated by Bayan Haddad, the workshop aims to gauge the social motives behind the authors’ creativity and experimentation in their writing. The event is open to the public and the audience’s participation in the conversation is part of it.