{"title":"Palestinian Dependence on External Health Services: De-development as a Tool of Dispossession","authors":"Yara M Asi","doi":"10.1163/18763375-14030004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18763375-14030004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Through multiple mechanisms, armed conflict degrades and destroys health systems, leaving significant gaps in care delivery that lead to worse health outcomes. Civilian populations are often left at the mercy of multiple stakeholders to attain health care. Often, they are unable to meet their needs within their own territory. This has been documented as the case throughout the occupied Palestinian territories for decades. In this paper, I argue that the destruction and de-development of the Palestinian health system is not just a side effect of conflict, but is part of a broader effort of dispossession, disconnecting Palestinians from their land and from each other. I focus on the multiple ways Palestinians are forced to depend on external actors to seek needed care due to the limitations of blockade and occupation, the drivers of these pathways, and the outcomes of this dependence. Lastly, I provide recommendations for refocusing health efforts internally.","PeriodicalId":43500,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Law and Governance","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47685685","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Putting Palestinian Agency First","authors":"Wendy Pearlman","doi":"10.1163/18763375-14030003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18763375-14030003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 While some political science scholarship and commentary on Palestinian politics engages Palestinian society as a topic of empirical scrutiny and theoretical significance, much of it either ignores society-level actors and dynamics or regards them as superfluous. Accordingly, society factors into the political story to the degree that it absorbs Israeli policies, is manipulated by self-interested factions, or is pushed to extremism by repression or religious radicalism. This special issue pushes against these trends. This introduction begins with an illustration of the problem, using the example of protest and how, for a century, many commentaries dismiss the societal groundings of mobilization. The essay then reviews a broad interdisciplinary scholarship that offers an alternative approach and the new contribution made by each of the five research articles in this issue. As a collection, these cutting-edge works put Palestinian society front and center as the driver of the Palestinian national movement, the anchor of Palestinian politics, and a key to the Arab-Israeli conflict without which no resolution is possible.","PeriodicalId":43500,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Law and Governance","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48799053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Measuring the (In)security of Palestinian Civil Society Websites","authors":"A. Abrahams, Etienne Maynier","doi":"10.1163/18763375-14030001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18763375-14030001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Civil society organizations (cso s) are reemerging as the central reference of the Palestinian struggle at a time when cyber threats to civil society are on the rise worldwide. We developed a web scanning tool to gather security data on websites and web servers, finding Palestinian cso s neglect even basic precautions like encrypting web traffic or keeping software updated. Why? Evidence suggests this neglect cannot easily be explained by technical or financial constraints. Widening our scan to include Israeli organizations, and non-Palestinian organizations allied with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (bds) movement, we find similar security lapses, suggesting insecurity is neither unique to Palestinian cso s nor does it necessarily decline as organizations enter into contentious politics. Our results underscore the sociotechnical nature of cybersecurity, while encouraging greater vigilance from cso s.","PeriodicalId":43500,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Law and Governance","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48235450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"After the Uprising: the Intifada-Oslo Generation and Attitudes Toward the Palestinian Police","authors":"Diana B. Greenwald, Mark Tessler","doi":"10.1163/18763375-14030002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18763375-14030002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Does experiencing a mass uprising during one’s formative years shape attitudes toward post-uprising institutions? Existing research on cohorts has not examined settings of ongoing statelessness. We focus on Palestinians who witnessed the First Intifada and subsequent Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during their youth-to-adulthood transition. Analyzing a pooled sample of surveys conducted between 1996 and 2000, we observe that men from this cohort – using a youth-based definition of one’s formative years – evaluated the Palestinian police more negatively than did other men, ceteris paribus. We test two, potential explanations. We find support for the proposition that men from this cohort held distinctive views about coercion and resistance that shaped their evaluations. We conclude that experiencing mass mobilization and transition during one’s formative years can influence attitudes, but additional work is needed to test for their long-term endurance. Further, a younger operationalization of one’s impressionable years may be salient in settings of insecurity.","PeriodicalId":43500,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Law and Governance","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45070655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social Accountability in Challenging Environments: Case Studies from Egypt","authors":"Yasmin Khodary","doi":"10.1163/18763375-15020003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18763375-15020003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Through deploying the 2015 World Bank framework of contextual drivers for social accountability, this article seeks to examine three recent social accountability initiatives (sais) in the agriculture, health, and local development sectors in Egypt to identify the contextual drivers and success factors of sais operating in challenging environments. The article aims to answer the following questions: what roles do recent sais in Egypt play? What are the challenges that sais encounter? And how do such challenges (re)shape the processes and dynamics of sais? The article finds that in challenging environments–where invited spaces are controlled, citizens’ collective action is limited, and commitment by state-officials is not guaranteed–the role of interlocutors becomes key in boosting the effectiveness of sais. It plays the role of a mediator, mobilizer to citizen and state action, and information intermediary, which generates, simplifies, and disseminates information. In this sense, this article draws on the critical missing link in sais through an in-depth analysis of the role of interlocutors in overcoming challenging or constraining circumstances.","PeriodicalId":43500,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Law and Governance","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43868478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Capitalism in Academia and the Theory of Academic Capitalism: Political Economy of Higher Education in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan","authors":"Taavi Sundell","doi":"10.1163/18763375-15020002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18763375-15020002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The theory of academic capitalism (ac) is a prominent attempt to grasp the multifaceted organizational and functional transformations of universities and higher education (he) in contemporary times. However, this has rarely provided an in-depth examination of the meaning of capitalism in the context of he and has largely ignored the Global South. Focusing on the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, this paper begins by examining the political economy of this country’s little-studied he system. It explores its entanglements with the broader Jordanian political economy by focusing on for-profit private universities and the implications of capitalist (foreign) ownership for their functioning and governance. The article draws, in part, on novel interview data gathered by the author in Jordan from 2015–17 to elaborate Jordanian he elite’s understanding of this system. The Jordanian case is juxtaposed with ac to appraise the applicability of the theory to contexts distinct from advanced capitalist economies.","PeriodicalId":43500,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Law and Governance","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49473957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Not Anymore in Politics: Theorising the Young Egyptian Muslim Brothers’ Political Disengagement in the aftermath of the 2013 Military Coup","authors":"Doha Abdelgawad, Shaimaa Magued","doi":"10.1163/18763375-15020001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18763375-15020001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This study relies on the life story narratives of 48 young members of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers in identifying the different reasons behind their political disengagement in the aftermath of the 2013 military coup. Unlike the smt scholarly writings addressing Islamists’ political disengagement within a limited scope of analysis that focuses on members leaving their groups rather than politics, this study presents a multi-layered approach that examines the interplay between youth’s personal experiences, the repressive macro political conditions, and the organizational decay in shaping young Muslim Brothers’ positions towards political activism.","PeriodicalId":43500,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Law and Governance","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44319622","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Curating Sovereignty in Palestine: Voluntary Grassroots Organizations and Civil Society in the West Bank and East Jerusalem","authors":"Catherine E. Herrold","doi":"10.1163/18763375-15030001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18763375-15030001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article extends the literature on “ngo-ization” in the Middle East and Global South to examine “voluntary grassroots organizations” (vgo s): groups that operate on a voluntary basis and position themselves outside of the formal ngo sector and foreign aid system. Based on nine months of ethnographic research in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the article examines how vgo s use heritage practices as a two-pronged challenge to the ngo-ization of Palestinian civil society. Whereas ngo-ization depoliticized civil society, vgo s resist depoliticization by mobilizing Palestinians to counter the Israeli occupation. And whereas ngo-ization professionalized civil society, vgo s resist professionalization by building large volunteer bases, emphasizing long-term processes of citizen mobilization rather than short-term outcomes, and remaining grounded in local communities and accountable to local citizens. Their work reflects larger trends around the world in which civic actors turn to informal organizing in an era of growing disenchantment with traditional ngo s.","PeriodicalId":43500,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Law and Governance","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47108881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Old Civil Society Networks and their Role for the Tunisian Political Landscape","authors":"Jan-Erik Refle","doi":"10.1163/18763375-20221319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18763375-20221319","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Civil society is generally seen as the safeguard of Tunisian democratization, but how do networks in Tunisian civil society manifest? Which are the important actors and how do they interact? The paper takes a network perspective as used in social movement studies to analyze the networks and their influence on the Tunisian political landscape by comparing four ‘old’ civil society organizations. In taking the network perspective, a coalition can be observed and the positions within the coalition are unevenly distributed among actors. What is particularly striking is the minimal interaction with newer civil society organizations mainly due to a lack of confidence. A generational divide is found in Tunisian civil society, which not only concerns personal age, but also organizational age that often equates to reputation and resources.","PeriodicalId":43500,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Law and Governance","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41448812","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Organizational Rifts within Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and the Question of Violence","authors":"Mohammad Yaghi, Annette Ranko","doi":"10.1163/18763375-20221217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18763375-20221217","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article traces the rift within Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood since the July 2013 military coup. It argues that the tensions within the Brotherhood that became public in early 2015 have led to the formation of two organizations within the movement, each with its own leadership, structure, and media outlets. The article contends that the split within the Brotherhood between the two camps—the pacifists and the revolutionists—is over leadership, legitimacy, and strategy. Furthermore, the article investigates whether the revolutionists have espoused the use of violence against al-Sisi regime. Its findings confirm that while the revolutionists do not adopt any of the violent actions against the regime, they tolerate the use of violence in the name of qisas, self-defense, and retaliation. These findings are based on a thorough review of the official statements of the revolutionary camp within the Brotherhood.","PeriodicalId":43500,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Law and Governance","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46153705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}