Today I gave a talk entitled “Nigeria’s War on Terror: The Geopolitics of Boko Haram”, to the Political Science & International Relations Academic Fellowship Program Discipline Group meeting. This is a programme run by the Open Society Institute, and this meeting was held in Büyükçekmece, Istanbul. It seemed to go fairly well, and there was some good discussion, helped by some generous and useful comments by Roland Dannreuther in the discussant role. I’ll be drawing on this same paper in a much briefer presentation to the AAG next week.

The AFP has, in the past, mainly worked with former Soviet states and some from central and Eastern Europe, but is now developing links with academics in Myanmar, Liberia and Palestine, among others. In May I’ll be visiting Al Quds University, which has campuses in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Abu Dis, to work with colleagues there in their urban studies and political science programmes. The specific base for these programs is a liberal arts college, set up by Al Quds University with Bard College. They have an interesting initiative of a ‘campus in camps’ where the university teaches in refuge camps in the West Bank. That may be part of my May visit.

Part of the point of this current event is to build links with partner institutions and meet other academic fellows and share experience. As I’ve not been out to Al Quds as yet this is simply a learning process for me, but it’s also a rather different kind of academic conference. Although I went to a talk on Thomas Hobbes and one on Heidegger and Derrida’s readings of Aristotle, there are also talks on a range of places and topics outside of things I’d usually attend at conferences. Tomorrow for instance I’m moderating a session with two papers, one of which looks at democratization in Mongolia and the Kyrgyz republic; the other examines bureaucracy and citizenship in Armenia.

The conference site is a long way from the centre of Istanbul, which is a shame because this is my first visit to Turkey, but it is only a couple of minutes walk from the hotel to the Sea of Marmara.