Silvia Regina Ferabolli

Silvia Ferabolli Visiting Fellow 115 Prospect St., New Haven, CT 06520-8206

Fields of interest: Arab world; Arab regionalism; Arab-Latin American relations; South-South relations; Pedagogy as politics. Silvia Ferabolli is a Lecturer in the Department of Economics and International Relations at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS, Brazil), where she also she coordinates the Research Group on the International Relations of the Arab World (NUPRIMA). She holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London). As a Visiting Fellow with the Council on Middle East Studies (CMES) at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, she is advancing her project titled “Teaching/Learning International Relations of the Arab World”, a work inspired in Paulo Freire’s philosophy of education and informed by IR scholarship concerned with worlding beyond the West and regional worlds. This engages with the quest of understanding how knowledge is produced, consumed, and reproduced in the Global South – with a special focus on the study of the Arab world from Brazil. While at Yale, she will also further develop her newest research project on the cross-fertilization between the Latin and Arab thinking and action. Silvia has built her entire career as a Brazilian who studies the Arab world based on this statement from Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães: “The peripheral societies are isolated from each other and can only see each other under the vigilant eyes of the core countries. The fact that they see each other through third-party eyes is evident when one observes the shortage and even the lack of studies of one peripheral state about another. Meanwhile, the sustained effort of the core countries to study the periphery and to formulate their own views about it is notorious … views that are then disseminated and absorbed by the periphery itself” (500 Years of Periphery: a Contribution to the Study of International Politics, 1999). Her main publications include “Relações Internacionais do Mundo Árabe: os Desafios para a Realização da Utopia Pan-arabista” (Juruá 1ªed. 2009; 2ªed. 2013), “Arab regionalism: a Post-structural Perspective” (Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics 2014 hardcover; 2016 paperback), “Regions that Matter: the Arab-South American Interregional Space” (Third World Quarterly 2017), and “Space Making in the Global South: Lessons from the GCC-Mercosur Agreement” (Contexto Internacional 2021).