Translating Islam and Palestine: Digital Diplomacy and the Struggle over Global Meaning
Every war is fought twice: once on the ground and once over how its story is told and understood. This second battle is more pervasive, waged through narrative rather than arms, with translation serving as one of its most powerful instruments. This keynote argues that in the digital age, translation functions as a concealed infrastructure of power. Visible as a technical practice yet often inconspicuous in its hegemonic effects, it helps shape what becomes legible, credible and true, pre-structuring interpretation itself.
Through the lens of Islam and Palestine, two of the most relentlessly translated and systematically distorted sites of global meaning-making through which Muslims and Palestinians are made legible in global public culture, I explore how state and non-state actors deploy translation across digital platforms, messaging and algorithmic ecosystems to engineer interpretation. What is at stake is not merely representation but the production of interpretive conditions. Translation operates as a political mechanism that organises how events are perceived, who counts as grievable and which histories enter public recognition. It becomes the process through which legitimacy and threat are unevenly distributed, authorising some subjects as modern, democratic and civilised while casting others as suspect, excessive or backward.
The keynote concludes by tracing how this work of projection changes when it becomes increasingly automated. When geopolitical meaning-making is outsourced to artificial intelligence, historical bias is not erased; it is encoded and naturalised. It becomes scalable, recursive and harder to detect. To examine translation today is to confront one of the central questions of our time: who determines the interpretive conditions under which the world can be understood?
