Mai Taha
Biographic Data
| ID | 297030 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mai Taha |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mai |
| FAMILY NAME | Taha |
| SIGNATURE | TAHA M |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7313-4048 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
“Exiting Law, Entering Revolution”
Today, when any form of Palestinian resistance is demonized, international legal scholars have understandably sought to remind us that there is a right to armed resistance in international law, that colonized people have a legal right to fight back. While such appeals to the law are sometimes important, I am interested in tactics of liberation that take seriously the current conjuncture with the waning relevance of international law, the position…
Sonic Cartographies of Internationalism
How does sound chart a different story of anticolonialism? Sound could perhaps draw out another map of space in history. Mirroring the form of sound waves, this article travels across borders, following the way sound waves themselves move. This is partly what makes sound so important, and what made the radio so central to anticolonial movements: Sound waves built new relations of solidarity because they could not be confined within colonial borde…
Capitalism at Home
Histories of capitalism in Egypt and the broader postcolonial world have much to gain from theorizing the home as a space of labor and care as a form of work. In this article the authors think with two Egyptian novels—The Open Door by Latifa al-Zayyat and Dhat by Sonallah Ibrahim—that center intimacy, care, and the home in their understandings of political and economic change. Representing both a revolutionary and a counterrevolutionary moment in…
Social Reproduction as Survival and Insurgency in Gaza
What is happening in Gaza now is a total displacement of any form of normality. This displacement of the normal has been effected by a population-wide project of social reproduction. Every Gazan, including children, is solicited to reproduce life, to survive. At the same time, social reproduction in Palestine has always also entailed insurgent possibilities, where this form of labour has indeed sustained and reproduced Palestinian revolutionary a…
Insurgent Social Reproduction
While the Palestinian home has been a target of relentless demolition and displacement, it has historically also been a place of care, culture, labour, and resistance. Indeed, the home is always becoming, constantly remade with every demolition and every displacement. The home embodies these contradictions: both a crime scene and a revolutionary space; a site of colonial surveillance and destruction, and a grounding site of labour and reconstruct…
History and contestation
In this article, I share some thoughts about the afterlives of Karen Knop’s work within the space of the classroom, a space she inhabited with humility, interest, and care. I am approaching this as an ode to her, not only as a brilliant scholar but also as a wonderful teacher, supervisor, and mentor. Every year, I teach ‘The Canon of Self-Determination,’ a chapter from Knop’s 2002 book Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law. Throug…
Objects, memories, and storytelling
How do objects narrate the past, the everyday, and interrogate im/ possible futures? How do they undo our 'ideas of home'? What affects do they gather and what subjectivities and different forms of intimacy do they call into conversation? This compendium article brings a visual artist together with nine early career academics researching and archiving fragments from homes in Egypt, Sudan, and Palestine (and their global connections). In doing so …
Thinking through the Home
This essay explores the tensions between two positions on revolutionary subjectivity. The first confines it to the production process and the creation of value, and the second ignores the value-form as economistic Marxist orthodoxy. I consider a third position that tries to capture the reach and open-endedness of capitalism, and in the process imagine a more expansive conception of revolutionary subjectivity. Accounting for the vastness of capita…
Mai Taha, Review of Cait Storr, International Status in the Shadow of Empire
From Cairo to Jerusalem
Reading ‘Class’ in International Law
While critical histories of international law on the interwar period have focused primarily on nationalism, early conceptions of the right to self-determination, and the dynamic of cultural difference, this article brings to bear another dimension that shaped interwar governmentality of legal institutions, namely class subjectivity. How did international institutions manage ‘class’ in a colonial context and at the height of the ‘self-determinatio…
The Egyptian revolution in and out of the juridical space
Since the spark of the Egyptian revolution in January 2011, issues of political party law reform, constitutional declarations, and the institution of free and fair elections have taken the lead in mainstream politics, and at times, relegated the role of organised labour to mere economistic agitation and disruption of an already ‘disrupted’ life, in the eyes of the Egyptian public. In contrast to mainstream depiction of the labour movement as a ‘s…
Objects, memories, and storytelling
How do objects narrate the past, the everyday, and interrogate im/ possible futures? How do they undo our 'ideas of home'? What affects do they gather and what subjectivities and different forms of intimacy do they call into conversation? This compendium article brings a visual artist together with nine early career academics researching and archiving fragments from homes in Egypt, Sudan, and Palestine (and their global connections). In doing so …
Insurgent Social Reproduction
While the Palestinian home has been a target of relentless demolition and displacement, it has historically also been a place of care, culture, labour, and resistance. Indeed, the home is always becoming, constantly remade with every demolition and every displacement. The home embodies these contradictions: both a crime scene and a revolutionary space; a site of colonial surveillance and destruction, and a grounding site of labour and reconstruct…
Reading ‘Class’ in International Law
While critical histories of international law on the interwar period have focused primarily on nationalism, early conceptions of the right to self-determination, and the dynamic of cultural difference, this article brings to bear another dimension that shaped interwar governmentality of legal institutions, namely class subjectivity. How did international institutions manage ‘class’ in a colonial context and at the height of the ‘self-determinatio…
Thinking through the Home
This essay explores the tensions between two positions on revolutionary subjectivity. The first confines it to the production process and the creation of value, and the second ignores the value-form as economistic Marxist orthodoxy. I consider a third position that tries to capture the reach and open-endedness of capitalism, and in the process imagine a more expansive conception of revolutionary subjectivity. Accounting for the vastness of capita…
The Egyptian revolution in and out of the juridical space
Since the spark of the Egyptian revolution in January 2011, issues of political party law reform, constitutional declarations, and the institution of free and fair elections have taken the lead in mainstream politics, and at times, relegated the role of organised labour to mere economistic agitation and disruption of an already ‘disrupted’ life, in the eyes of the Egyptian public. In contrast to mainstream depiction of the labour movement as a ‘s…
Reading ‘Class’ in International Law
While critical histories of international law on the interwar period have focused primarily on nationalism, early conceptions of the right to self-determination, and the dynamic of cultural difference, this article brings to bear another dimension that shaped interwar governmentality of legal institutions, namely class subjectivity. How did international institutions manage ‘class’ in a colonial context and at the height of the ‘self-determinatio…
From Cairo to Jerusalem
Mai Taha, Review of Cait Storr, International Status in the Shadow of Empire
Objects, memories, and storytelling
How do objects narrate the past, the everyday, and interrogate im/ possible futures? How do they undo our 'ideas of home'? What affects do they gather and what subjectivities and different forms of intimacy do they call into conversation? This compendium article brings a visual artist together with nine early career academics researching and archiving fragments from homes in Egypt, Sudan, and Palestine (and their global connections). In doing so …
Thinking through the Home
This essay explores the tensions between two positions on revolutionary subjectivity. The first confines it to the production process and the creation of value, and the second ignores the value-form as economistic Marxist orthodoxy. I consider a third position that tries to capture the reach and open-endedness of capitalism, and in the process imagine a more expansive conception of revolutionary subjectivity. Accounting for the vastness of capita…
History and contestation
In this article, I share some thoughts about the afterlives of Karen Knop’s work within the space of the classroom, a space she inhabited with humility, interest, and care. I am approaching this as an ode to her, not only as a brilliant scholar but also as a wonderful teacher, supervisor, and mentor. Every year, I teach ‘The Canon of Self-Determination,’ a chapter from Knop’s 2002 book Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law. Throug…
Social Reproduction as Survival and Insurgency in Gaza
What is happening in Gaza now is a total displacement of any form of normality. This displacement of the normal has been effected by a population-wide project of social reproduction. Every Gazan, including children, is solicited to reproduce life, to survive. At the same time, social reproduction in Palestine has always also entailed insurgent possibilities, where this form of labour has indeed sustained and reproduced Palestinian revolutionary a…
Insurgent Social Reproduction
While the Palestinian home has been a target of relentless demolition and displacement, it has historically also been a place of care, culture, labour, and resistance. Indeed, the home is always becoming, constantly remade with every demolition and every displacement. The home embodies these contradictions: both a crime scene and a revolutionary space; a site of colonial surveillance and destruction, and a grounding site of labour and reconstruct…
“Exiting Law, Entering Revolution”
Today, when any form of Palestinian resistance is demonized, international legal scholars have understandably sought to remind us that there is a right to armed resistance in international law, that colonized people have a legal right to fight back. While such appeals to the law are sometimes important, I am interested in tactics of liberation that take seriously the current conjuncture with the waning relevance of international law, the position…
Sonic Cartographies of Internationalism
How does sound chart a different story of anticolonialism? Sound could perhaps draw out another map of space in history. Mirroring the form of sound waves, this article travels across borders, following the way sound waves themselves move. This is partly what makes sound so important, and what made the radio so central to anticolonial movements: Sound waves built new relations of solidarity because they could not be confined within colonial borde…
Capitalism at Home
Histories of capitalism in Egypt and the broader postcolonial world have much to gain from theorizing the home as a space of labor and care as a form of work. In this article the authors think with two Egyptian novels—The Open Door by Latifa al-Zayyat and Dhat by Sonallah Ibrahim—that center intimacy, care, and the home in their understandings of political and economic change. Representing both a revolutionary and a counterrevolutionary moment in…
Political science (8 works) · Sociology (7 works) · International Law and Human Rights (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Colonialism (4 works) · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics (4 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (4 works) · Reproduction (4 works)