This lecture posits hate, dialogue, and their conjunction as fundamental for the contemporary moralization of violence and hierarchy. It analyzes how the two terms operate through a series of disavowals, displacements, and transubstantiations, tracking their place in the history of political thought, structures of minoritization, and contemporary formations where they became rhetorical vehicles and conceptual nodes for anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian policies and discourses. Out of this history, the hateful subject emerges, indexed by the deployment of a demand for dialogue. The lecture then outlines three global moments in which hate and dialogue were pegged to the development of refugee and terrorism discourses, outlining how the two terms traveled as a covering trope that psychologizes violence. The imputation of hate and the veneration of dialogue have long had a polemical edge: their moralization was grafted to and elaborated against Palestinians.

Murad Idris is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. His award-winning book, War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford, 2019), examines how philosophers fantasize about peace in order to promote hierarchy, war, and repression. He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (Oxford, 2020), with Leigh Jenco and Megan Thomas, and co-authored Political Theory: A Global and Comparative Introduction (SAGE, 2025), with Leigh Jenco and Paulina Ochoa Espejo. He is completing projects about Sayyid Qutb’s global and critical thought, the genealogies of racializing Islam, and the politics of hate and dialogue. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania with specializations in Political Theory and Middle East Politics.

Spring 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES

THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Spring 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.

This event is co-sponsored by the Global Political Thought Working Group. Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.