Palestinian Governance under Occupation

A groundbreaking new book, plus this week's MENA Academy roundup!

Welcome to this week’s MENA Academy roundup! I will be brief this week, because I’m overseas for a fantastic Pasiri workshop that I’ll be writing about soon. The podcast will also return soon after its hiatus, but will be on an irregular schedule for the summer.

First up: Diana Greenwald’s fantastic new book, Mayors in the Middle: Indirect Rule and Local Government in Occupied Palestine (Columbia University Press, 2024). I was thrilled to be able to publish this pathbreaking work in my series Columbia Studies on Middle East Politics. It couldn’t be more timely. Mayors in the Middle is a carefully researched and theoretically innovative study of Palestinian governance in the West Bank under Israeli occupation from the 1970s onward. Greenwald details a succession of Israeli efforts to construct mechanisms of indirect rule, and the variety of ways in which Palestinian political actors attempted to pursue their interests within the constraints. While fully attentive to the particularities of the Palestinian experience and the Israeli occupation, Greenwald refuses to exceptionalize it in ways that place it outside comparative analysis: her comparisons to British India (to which there are a lot of direct connections given the nature of the British empire) and Apartheid South Africa really help to illuminate what is and isn’t unique about the Palestinian-Israeli experience. She shows clearly and powerfully how the Palestinian Authority — particularly its reconstructed form following the second Intidada — devolved into a security subcontractor for Israel, divorced from any political horizon or negotiations aimed at building a Palestinian state. Mayors in the Middle should be required reading for anyone contemplating the current plans being mooted for a postwar Gaza such as promoting the role of clans or non-Hamas alternative elites; it’s all been tried before, and it hasn’t gone well.

Next, you might want to check out the new special issue of Israel Studies Review edited by Oded Haklai. In his open access framing essay, Haklai lays out the premise and motivations of the collection: to examine the political crisis which had consumed Israel in the year before October 7, including Netanyahu’s attempted judicial reforms and the mass mobilization against his efforts to change the political system to protect himself. The battle over the political system may have been put on hold by the war on Gaza, but he argues, it is far from over: “The motivations and causes that precipitated the drive to fundamentally transform the system of government have not vanished; on the contrary, they have deeply permeated Israeli society and politics, becoming embedded in the fabric of Israel's political culture.” The special issue features a wide range of fascinating contributions on the nature of Israeli democracy, the prospects of backsliding, the challenge to the rule of law, and much more.

Finally, here’s a few recent journal articles, including several by political scientists from within the POMEPS network.

Fred Lawson, “Revisiting Contemporary Revolutions in the Middle East and Africa,” Contemporary Arab Affairs (May 2024). ABSTRACT: Mark Beissinger’s The Revolutionary City marks a major advance in current scholarship on revolutions. Cases drawn from the Middle East and North Africa are an important component of the analysis. Yet instances of popular rebellion in this part of the world have been omitted and several instances that are included are mischaracterized. Specialists in regional affairs can contribute to improving the study of revolutions by revisiting this influential project.

Sarah Tobin, “Moving Money: Syrian Refugees Surviving Displacement in Jordan,” Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (May 2024). ABSTRACT: Hawala, the unregulated system for the informal transfer of money via passcodes, plays a vital role for Syrian refugees trying to survive in Jordan. The system was regularly utilized in Syria prior to the ongoing and brutal civil war that has created over 5 million refugees. Syrian refugees now have an increased dependency on hawala due to the dissolution of financial institutions within Syria and financial exclusion in countries of exile, including Jordan. The growth of and dependency on hawala by Syrian refugees in Jordan is occurring within a context where formal and digital transfers are both surveilled and access is curtailed. The unregulated system of hawala – and its users – have become targeted for governmental crackdowns on criminal activities such as money laundering, terrorism funding, and counter-terrorism surveillance. This article explores the context of policies and practice of humanitarian aid organizations that utilize cashless and low-cash transfers, as well as of states and agencies of refugee governance that aim to surveil and criminalize unregulated and informal transfers for fear of terrorism. Based on interviews with Syrian refugees and observations inside money exchange businesses in Syrian refugee camps and urban areas in Jordan, I argue that the unstable political situation and conditions of displacement create the need to transfer money and remittances via hawala. Further, that hawala is utilized, despite the political concerns to control such transfers, through adaptation in formality and flexibility in time and space, creating an institutional spectrum from formal and regulated, to semi-formal and regulated in part, and informal, which is unregulated. In addition, the gendered contours of hawala used by Syrian refugees in Jordan reveal important insights into the ways by which the method simultaneously evades surveillance and grows in use, which helps illuminate the ways that the system fulfils a necessary need for low-cash and cashless transfers by Syrian refugees.

Julia Michal Clark, Alexandra Blackman, and Aytug Sazmaz, “What Men Want: Parties’ Strategic Engagement With Gender Quotas,” Comparative Political Studies (May 2024). ABSTRACT: Women’s under-representation, particularly in political leadership, remains an important issue globally. Tunisia’s 2018 municipal elections included the adoption of strict gender quotas that resulted in near-parity of male and female elected councilors. Despite this achievement for descriptive representation, fewer than 20% of mayors—selected from among elected list-heads—were women. We argue that this gender gap in council leadership is the result of parties’ strategic engagement with the quota laws. Using election data, an original survey of candidates, and interviews, we demonstrate that parties systematically placed female-headed lists in their weakest districts, placing female candidates at a disadvantage during the mayoral selection process. We provide evidence that these behaviors were motivated by a strategy to avoid “displacing” men in established political networks. This research highlights the role that party elites play in maintaining the existing political bargain at the expense of underrepresented groups, even where strict quotas are adopted.

That’s it for this week - more coming soon, after I return from this long international trip (including details on this long international trip)!