Co-sponsored by the Global Political Thought Working Group

The idea that “hate” names a fundamental problem of our time has engulfed Anglophone public discourse. Republicans and Democrats, university presidents and doxxing campaigns, advocacy organizations and journalists, scholarly experts and “hate glossaries” criticize what they oppose as hate, demand standing against hate, and seem to treat hate as a diagnosis—one that comes with its own institutional prescriptions. In recent years, Gaza has put the pervasiveness and power of this discourse on full display. What is the long history of this way of diagnosing politics and the world? Who hates, what counts as hating, who is hated, and what broader philosophical structures and shifts underlie the subject for whom hate is a cipher or a code for understanding the world? The presentation offers a genealogy of “hate” through the question of Palestine over the last six decades, its transformations, and its intersections with anti-Muslim racism.

Murad Idris is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan and is currently a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. 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. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania with specializations in Political Theory and Middle East Politics.

Presented by the Center for Cultural Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies and the Department of Anthropology Colloquium. This event is open to all students, faculty, staff, and members of the public consistent with University policy and state and federal law.

Spring 2026 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 2026 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.

Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.