Neoliberal visions? Exploring gendered media and popular culture in the Palestinian West Bank

Walking through Ramallah, it is hard not to notice the commercial advertising billboards, TV screens, and posters that line the city’s streets. They frequently feature bright glossy images of young nuclear families – always a man and a woman, often with light skin – gazing longingly at ‘dream’ homes. These materials document how capital and aspiration are increasingly enfolded into everyday space in post-Oslo Palestine. They particularly show how neoliberal ‘reforms’ have transformed Palestine’s political economy over (at least) the past 30 years. Indeed, Ramallah today embodies the complexities wrought by the Oslo process more than any other space in Palestine: its inhabitants paradoxically live under a colonial present shaped by neoliberal capitalism. While recent works consider how such shifts reformulate the political economy of occupied Palestine, and/or reroute the struggle for national liberation, rarely are the cultural practices and media forms that mark, embody and communicate such political and economic changes centralised as sites of meaning-making. Even less forthcoming is work that explores how such representations cultivate shifts in gender and sexuality norms. This project offers a different interpretation of the West Bank’s neoliberal order that moves beyond these traditional theoretical straightjackets. Using textual and qualitative methods, it foregrounds both the production and consumption of gendered advertisements as a way to explore how neoliberal culture constructs gendered subjectivity. It broadly asks how transforming forms of political economy, social relations and cultural practices relate to changing modes of gendered subjectivity in contemporary Palestine

Civil Society in Palestine : "Case Studies"

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020.1. NGOs and State in Palestine: Negotiating Boundaries (Jamil Himal) 2. The Legislative Assembly versus the Government Executive (Jamil Himal) 3. Mobilisation of Camp Refugees and Local Municipal Authorities (Salim Tamari) 4. The Women's Model Parliament and Reform of Personal Status Law (Rema Hammami) 5.The Government (PNA) versus the Islamic Movement Hamas (Rema Hammami) 6. Governance and Control of Urban Space in Jerusalem (Salim Tamari

Multi-Party Elections in the Arab World: Institutional Engineering and Oppositional Strategies

Recent moves toward multi-party competition for elected legislatures in numerous Arab countries constitute a significant departure from earlier practices there, and create the basis for democratic activists to gradually chip away at persistent authoritarian rule. This article explores the institutional mechanisms by which incumbent authoritarian executives seek to engineer these elections. It documents examples of rulers changing electoral systems to ensure compliant legislatures, and demonstrates the prevalent use of winner-takes-all electoral systems, which generally work to the regimes\u27 advantage. I then review various strategies of opposition forces--boycotts, non-competition agreements, election monitoring, and struggles over election rules--and the dilemmas that these entail. Surmounting differences in terms of ideologies, as well as short-term political goals and prospects, is a central challenge. The future should see greater electoral participation among opposition activists, along with cleaner elections. As vote coercion and ballot box stuffing is restricted by opposition pressures, electoral institutions will take on greater importance, and struggles for proportional representation are likely to increase