Sari Hanafi

Spacio‐cide: colonial politics, invisibility and rezoning in Palestinian territory

In the last two decades, the Arab–Israeli conflict has been considered a ‘low intensity’ conflict, based on a typology which simply takes into account the number of casualties. This typology is misleading, since despite relatively low numbers of casualties, on other counts the conflict may be seen to be in the process of intensification. In particular, a key area that has been gaining relevance is related to space and land: dispossession, occupation and destruction of Palestinian living space and what the author calls spacio‐cide. In this paper, it is argued that the Israeli colonial project is ‘spacio‐cidal’ (as opposed to genocidal), in that it targets land for the purpose of rendering inevitable the ‘voluntary’ transfer of the Palestinian population, primarily by targeting the space upon which the Palestinian people live. This systematic destruction of the Palestinian living space becomes possible by exercising the state of exception and deploying bio‐politics to categorize Palestinians into different ...

University systems in the Arab East: Publish globally and perish locally vs publish locally and perish globally

This article attempts to demonstrate how the university system and the system of social knowledge production greatly influence elite formation in the Arab East (in Egypt, Syria, the Palestinian territory, Jordan and Lebanon) by focusing on three intertwined factors: compartmentalization of scholarly activities, the demise of the university as a public sphere and the criteria for publication that count towards promotion. Universities have often produced compartmentalized elites inside each nation-state and they don’t communicate with one another: they are either elite that publish globally and perish locally or elite that publish locally and perish globally. The article pays special attention to elite universities.

The Arab revolutions; the emergence of a new political subjectivity

Since late 2010, the Arab World has witnessed regime changes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya; and revolts by Arab citizens are still underway in Syria, Bahrain and Yemen, along with reform initiatives at different levels. These processes cannot be accurately be described by Orientalist terms such as ‘Arab Spring’, ‘Arab unrest’ or the ‘Facebook Revolution’, where such categorizations fail to account for the radical transformation in politics and values that the Arab World is undergoing and the significance that resides in the confluence of social and democratic demands. The ultimate fate of these popular uprisings remains in the balance, but it is all too clear that they have produced the most dramatic changes in the region since the mid-twentieth century which marked the end of the colonial era. This article aims to elucidate the import of term ‘the people’ and to whom it applies in the popular slogan: ‘The people want the overthrow of the regime’ (al-shaʿb yurīd isqāṭ al-niẓām). It aims to identify the acto...

Reshaping Geography: Palestinian Community Networks in Europe and the New Media

The continuing difficulty of finding a solution to the physical return of the Palestinian diaspora to the homeland is increasingly being addressed in the digital realm by the rise of virtual communities. PALESTA (Palestinian Scientists and Technologists Aboard) was established to harness the scientific and technological knowledge of expatriate professionals for the benefit of development efforts in Palestine. This paper will discuss both the possibilities and the limitations of the PALESTA network. Additionally, it will examine new media technology and its implications in charting diasporic movements across national borders. Internet networking does not suggest the ‘end of geography’ but rather a kind of ‘reshaping of geography’. Internet networking accomplishes this ‘reshaping’ by simultaneously connecting various dispersed communities not only to their centre but also to each other—periphery to periphery. The paper argues that, in a process of construction and reconstruction of Palestinian identity that is largely affected by dispersed people with a fragile centre of gravity, new media can become important tools for establishing direct contact between these communities, while sometimes challenging the centrality of the homeland in diasporic communications.

The Intifada and the Aid Industry: The Impact of the New Liberal Agenda on the Palestinian NGOs

The outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000 marks a return for the Palestinians to a period of direct anti-colonial struggle against the Israeli occupation. As the intifada attempts to figure conditions of possibility for Palestinian independence, it poses practical and theoretical challenges to researchers and practitioners alike. The intifada directly addresses Palestinian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as well as their international non-governmental organization (INGO) and donor counterparts. The uprising beckons these organizations to intervene and respond to the humanitarian crisis in the West Bank and Gaza; to act as a witness in the face of Israel’s massive military offensive against the Palestinian population; and to support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. In making this invocation, the Palestinian uprising provides the occasion, which unequivocally exposes the previously latent, manifold contradictions, and reveals the tensions in their relationship with the donors. The intifada exposes a disconnection between NGOs and popular movements in Palestine. It reveals Palestinian NGO activists as not able to articulate between their own aspirations for Palestinian freedom and independence and the overarching national agenda. This in turn raises complicated questions: how does one conceptualize and explain the relationship between NGOs, INGOs and donors, and what are the most important structural relations and historically contingent factors that have shaped and constituted this relationship? This article will attempt to shed some light about the paradoxes illuminated by the uprising. Based on empirical research and interviews conducted before the outbreak of the second intifada and during it, we analyze in the first section the role of the NGOs during this intifada and the impact of the aid industry in shaping this role. More broadly the role of NGOs cannot be understood without unraveling the nature of the relationship between Palestinian NGOs (PNGOs), INGOs and donors, as set within and shaped by processes internal to Palestinian society, as well as mechanisms and structural relations within the aid industry. This will be developed in the second section. I. The Intifada and the Problematic Modes of Action of the Palestinian NGOs The outbreak of the second intifada is nothing short of a collective act of resistance against Israel’s occupation and its colonial system of control. During seven years of the Oslo, Israel’s exercise of control over the Palestinians not only deepened, but metamorphosed into an apartheid regime of checkpoints, permit system, bypass roads, and settlements, encircling and besieging Palestinian cantons of ‘territoriality.’ 1 By 2003, however, as the Palestinian uprising enters its third year, a palpable sense of crisis is evident. Not only has Israel’s siege on Palestinian towns, its military invasions and its reoccupation of the West Bank, exacted a heavy humanitarian, social and economic toll, but disquiet looms over the achievements of the uprising. Behind closed doors questions are being raised about the capacity of the intifada to realize Palestinian political aspirations, given the variance in tactics and strategies espoused by different factions and the difficulties of harmonizing societal energies and harnessing them into a single end. This is not to mention the colonial stratagems of the Sharon government’s and its use of armed provocations, particularly its assassinations of Palestinian leaders, not only as a way to escalate the conflict, but also to create havoc within Palestinian internal politics, in an attempt to thwart Palestinian national unity. There are three separate challenges facing Palestinian society today. A consideration of each will delineate the disjunctures and antagonisms within the NGO sphere that are have a bearing on the current crisis, as well as illustrate the overarching issues framing NGO, INGO and donor relations in Palestine.

Human (in)security: Palestinian perceptions of security in and around the refugee camps in Lebanon

Based upon over 20 hours of focus groups and in-depth interviews with diverse representation from three Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, the authors analyse Palestinian perceptions of both Lebanese and Palestinian security institutions, detailing the ways in which conventional, state-centric approaches to security by both parties have been insufficient. Special attention is paid to the new security regime in the Nahr al-Bared camp, which was destroyed in 2007 during a protracted battle between the Lebanese army and the militant Islamist group Fatah al-Islam. This is because the Government of Lebanon has made clear its intention that this regime serve as a model for the countrys other 11 camps. Ultimately, the authors argue, Palestinian human security is inextricably linked to Lebanese sovereignty and national security, and the improvement of Palestinian human security will yield tangible security benefits for Lebanese and Palestinians alike. Rather than presume to speak on behalf of all Palestinians in Lebanon, the authors have instead opted to present detailed—and sometimes contradictory—quotations from Palestinians interviewed on such subjects as arms, violent extremism, Lebanese–Palestinian relations and the protection of human rights.

Explaining spacio-cide in the Palestinian territory: Colonization, separation, and state of exception

This article argues that the Israeli colonial project is ‘spacio-cidal’ (as opposed to genocidal) in that it targets land for the purpose of rendering inevitable the ‘voluntary’ transfer of the Palestinian population primarily by targeting the space upon which the Palestinian people live. The spacio-cide is a deliberate ideology with unified rational, albeit dynamic process because it is in constant interaction with the emerging context and the actions of the Palestinian resistance. By describing and questioning different aspects of the military-judicial-civil apparatuses, this article examines how the realization of the spacio-cidal project becomes possible through a regime that deploys three principles, namely: the principle of colonization, the principle of separation, and the state of exception that mediates between these two seemingly contradictory principles.

Who frames the debate on the Arab uprisings? Analysis of Arabic, English, and French academic scholarship

Since 2010, there has been a proliferation of literature (newspaper articles and scholarly publications) on the recent uprisings in some Arab countries. This article focuses on the way the academic articles have perceived the Arab uprisings and the ways in which we portray them in scientific discourse, taking into account the social forces that come into play in the production of knowledge. In line with Bruno Latour, this study analyzes (1) what knowledge on the Arab uprisings is made of; (2) who produces and who frames the debate (network of authors); (3) semiotic analysis; and (4) quantitative measures of ‘sociological markers,’ such as discipline, language, and institutional affiliation. The study is based on a database of around 519 articles (from Web of Science, Scopus, E-Marefa, Cairn) dealing with the Arab uprisings from January 2011 up to now.

Introduction to the special issue on Arab uprisings

The uprisings in the Arab World started out in a marginal town in Tunisia toward the end of 2010; travelled like wildfire throughout the Arab region in 2011; inspired various protest movements around the world that same year; then gradually assumed different trajectories that are still underway. As is often the case with revolutions, these events continue to supply us with a repertoire of surprises, counter plots, setbacks and successes. Where did these movements come from? How do they relate to older movements in the region? What do they tell us about how to study social movements and revolutions? What are their distinctive features? What features do they have in common with older movements and revolutions worldwide? The one certain fact about the Arab uprisings is that they were surprising. Sometimes one hears in public discussions voices that reject the notion that the uprisings were surprising, and insist that there were clear signs of them all along. But none of the experts on the region saw such signs, and even local intellectuals who had sincerely wished for revolutions never saw them coming. In fact, whenever they had sought, before 2011, to describe how a revolution would happen, their frame of reference was a variety of Leninism – that is, the model of organization that is least relevant to the study of the Arab uprisings. In any case, there is nothing more common that after-the-fact reconstructions of events, so that they appear to have been destined all along to put us on a revolutionary path. The fact that large numbers of Arabs, from different classes and demographics, had great grievances against most of their governing orders for decades does not suggest that a revolution was imminent. We do not know revolutions to be inevitable, since we still have no science that proves to us that they are. But we know them to be products of human decisions. Sometimes these decisions are taken without any assurance of success – that is, without pre-known resources, opportunities, frames, facilitating conditions, or any of the factors that sociologists typically associate with mass mobilization in general. Revolutions, therefore, are opportunities to learn something new. The worst analytical insult to a revolution is to use it as an opportunity to apply mechanically an existing theory or model. This is because when a revolution had not been anticipated – as is usually the case – then it cannot be assumed to be part of our current knowledge system. In that case, we must begin from the assumption that the knowledge that is needed to understand the revolution comes with the revolution, and does not precede it. So the question 584500 ISS0010.1177/0268580915584500International SociologyBamyeh and Hanafi research-article2015

The marginalization of the Arab language in social science: Structural constraints and dependency by choice

This article aims at questioning the relationship between Arab social research and language by arguing that many factors including the political economy of publication, globalization, internationalization and commodification of higher education have marginalized peripheral languages such as Arabic. The authors demonstrate, on the one hand, that this marginalization is not necessarily structurally inevitable but indicates dependency by choice, and, on the other hand, how globalization has reinforced the English language hegemony. This article uses the results of a questionnaire survey about the use of references in PhD and Master’s theses. The survey, which was answered by 165 persons, targeted those who hold a Master’s or PhD degree from any university in the Arab world or who have dealt with a topic related to the Arab world, no matter in which discipline.