From Bare Lives to Political Agents. Palestinian Refugees a Avant-Garde

Refugees and displaced have been, by and large, absent from recent analyses of the Arab uprisings, unless as accidental victims and consequences of violence. Analyses and debates on the reconfiguration of rights, democracy, social justice and dignity in the region suffer from a chronic methodological nationalism, which perpetuates the idea that people seek and fight for rights and self-determination solely in their national territory, seen as the natural context for achieving a full social personhood. The implication is that those who are at the margins of nation-states or who are displaced from their own original nations/territories, like Palestinian refugees, come to be twice marginalised and their predicament is made even more invisible. The idea of return as their only life project does not give justice to the complexity of their aspirations and claims that comprise the right to have rights, alongside the right to return to their lost land and properties, which could be conceived, more broadly, as a return to dignity. The implications are extremely significant and point to the need to rethink nationalism and the classic modern project of the nation-state as the only site for self-determination. Refugees’ narratives and practices call for a critical examination of the classic notion that access to rights should be dependent upon belonging to territorially bound and homogenous national communities, a notion that is flawed to start with in most Middle Eastern nation-states, where structures and opportunities for power, rights, and resources reflect and reinforce complex hierarchies based on ethnic, religious, gender, and class divisions

The Relevance of Gender in/and Migration

Euro-Mediterranean Consortium for Applied Research on International Migration (CARIM

Refugees and cathartic politics. From human rights to the right to be human

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are often described as living in a condition of waithood, suspended from law and awaiting return to their national homeland, where they will finally turn into qualified political lives. This frame, stemming from Hannah Arendt’s legacy, fetishizes rights and the nation-state as the spheres where the human ceases to be a mere biological body subject to humanitarian relief and finally turns into a fully fledged subject of rights. This article, in contrast, interrogates the possibility of political lives in gray areas. It asks, what conditions of being human are attainable in a context of juridical suspension? Can exile become grounds for an articulation of rights that overcomes the political, juridical, and emotive national frame as the only space for existing in the world? The article suggests understanding Palestinian refugees’ political subjectivity in Lebanon today not through the frame of defeat and demise—or as bare lives (Agamben)—but through the Gramscian lens of the cathartic moment. It explores the political work of catharsis as an emotional, moral, and rhetorical form of collective outbreak from national frames. Through catharsis and paroxysm, refugees expose the fallacies of humanitarianism and nation-state–based conception of rights and instead articulate a novel imaginary of a borderless humanity as a basis for politically qualified lives

Palestinian Refugees. Homes in exile

The pertinent question today is what kind of "politics of return" could grant Palestinians the right to self-determination and simultaneously counter the exclusionary politics towards Palestinian refugees of both Arab nation-states and of the Palestinian nationalist project? Palestinian refugees, and their camp/homes as social - historical sites giving new meanings to contemporary refugeehood - lie at the heart of a potential new political counter culture. At the core of this antagonistic politics should be the recognition that the refugee issue today is no longer solely about return, but also about rights writ-large, which involve a radical rethinking of citizenship and individual and collective self-determination in the region. The Palestinian refugee question, seen in this light, becomes a prism through which we can understand and critique long-term processes of national, sectarian and confessional boundary making in the Middle East. It therefore raises the question of how to radically reconfigure post-colonial national projects in Arab countries which have so far failed to meet aspirations for rights, democracy and pluralism for refugees and non refugees alike

Gender and Mobility across Southern and Eastern European Borders: "Double Standards" and the Ambiguities of the European Neighbourhood Policy

This article proposes a gendered critique of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), a policy framework that, amongst other things, aims to facilitate the mobility of migrants to the EU from the bordering countries. We highlight the ambivalences of European regimes of gender and migration, and we take issue with the celebration of the "feminisation of migration." The former fails to offer opportunities to women to safely embark on autonomous migratory projects, the latter contributes to reproduce traditional gender biases in the countries of origin as well as of destination. We conclude by suggesting that the EU critique to emigration countries for failing to tackle women's discrimination falls short of persuasiveness when confronted with the curtailment on women's independent mobility within the ENP framework

Cultures of Resistance in Palestine and Beyond: On the Politics of Art, Aesthetics, and Affect

Rather than considering protest art as singularly revolutionary, disruptive,or unsettling to established power structures per se, this article and the contributions in the special issue explore the complex relation between cultural politics, aesthetics, affect, and resistance. Many of the articles contextualize the ambivalent and nuanced relationship between works of art, culture, and resistance within wider, constantly shifting, multiple, hegemonic discourses, and power structures. These contributions cast a skeptical eye on the notion of resistance. They complicate our understanding of how political and economic contingencies,colonialism, neoliberal market-driven policies, and global and local discourses can work to normalize, appropriate, co-opt, and commodify protest art and resistance. Moreover, they shed light on the transformative potential of art that focuses on the ordinary, or activates affective ties by disrupting hegemonic imaginaries and sensibilities

Displacing the Anthropocene: colonisation, extinction and the unruliness of nature in Palestine

Recent ‘Anthropocene’ commentaries have argued that as humans have become decisively entangled in natural systems, they collectively became a geological species-agent potentially becoming aware of its own place in the deep history of planetary time. Through this, the argument goes, a pre-political collective consciousness could emerge, paving the way for a progressive construction of a common world, beyond particularistic justice-claims. The reverse case is made in scholarship of settler colonialism: the Anthropocene is rooted in histories of settler colonial violence and is deeply tied up with the dispossession and ‘extinction’ of Indigenous life-worlds. In this article, we foreground nature–human entanglement as crucial for understanding the operations but also the instability of settler colonialism in Palestine. We suggest that fractures and openings become legible when paying attention to the ‘afterlife’ of nature that was erased due to its enmeshment with Indigenous people. We provide a historical and ethnographic account of past and emerging entanglements between Palestinians refugees and their nature, ultimately arguing that indigeneity is recalcitrant to obliteration. With that in mind, we return to the Anthropocene’s focus on universal human extinction and ethical consciousness by critically engaging with it from the standpoint of colonised and displaced Indigenous populations, like the Palestinian refugees. We conclude by arguing that only when the profoundly unequal access to Life entrenched in settler colonialism is foregrounded and addressed, does a real possibility of recognising any common, global vulnerability that the species faces emerge

‘From Standing Rock to Palestine We are United’: diaspora politics, decolonisation and the intersectionality of struggles

This article analyses a form of diasporic activism that breaks the seeming duality between diasporic imaginaries and colonial realities, diasporas and refugees. By focusing on the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) it analyses a diasporic standpoint which is not confined to identity politics, nor to the Palestinian nationalist struggle of territorial liberation, but conceives of Palestine as one of the most visible, present-day materialisations of Western colonial modernity. The condition of this diasporic political subjectivity lies in what we call here an “intersectional ‘space of appearance’”: an affective multi-sited political space that exposes and makes visible the continuum of systems of subjugation and expropriation across liberal democracies and settler-colonial regimes, and the whiteness of mainstream activist spaces. This space encompasses key sites of Black, Indigenous, Arab and Muslim mobilization: from Ferguson to Standing Rock, from the Mexico-US border to Palestine and Palestinian camps, from Tunis to Paris