Political Economy

The Palestinian Museum: An Agent Of Empowerment And Integration For Palestinians

  On 11 April 2013, the Palestinian Museum celebrated its groundbreaking ceremony in Birzeit, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The museum, the largest in Palestine, will be dedicated to celebrating the history, culture and society of modern and contemporary Palestine. A flagship project of the Welfare Association, a leading not-for-profit that provides development and humanitarian assistance in Palestine since 1983, the Museum is set to open in 2014. In this interview, Omar Al-Qattan, the Chairman of the Museum Task Force, describes how the Palestinian Museum aims to be a place where anyone can take part in a shared conversation about the present, past, ...

The Palestinian Economy in East Jerusalem: Enduring Annexation, Isolation, and Disintegration

[The following report was issued by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development on 9 May 2013.] The Palestinian Economy in East Jerusalem: Enduring Annexation, Isolation, and Disintegration Executive Summary   With the onset of occupation in 1967, Israeli  authorities began to pursue a policy of physical, political, and economic segregation of East Jerusalem from the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT), which continues apace today. Segregation strategies gained momentum during the last decade through measures that have altered the physical and demographic realities of the city and its predominantly Palestinian ...

عيد العمال

Among the Thugs

Delhi. “We are mere coolies working at the machines in these terrible times. We are mere dupes and fools to discover the diamond and to make a gift of it to the king, to adorn his crown.” – Nazrul Islam. Sohel Rana is a well-known figure in South Asia. He is the guy who, in my youth, would stand at the street-corner, holding court with a bunch of toughs, and offering his threatening ways as protection or intimidation for payment. As South Asian countries entered the pact of globalisation, the Sohel Ranas of the street-corner opened an office. They put up a signboard that said something like Property Dealer or Import-Export, they lost their cheap clothes for ...

Joint Statement Demanding Public Release of Egyptian Budget

[The following statement was issued by a group of political parties and NGOs, including the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, on 21 April 2013.]  Continuing with the blackout approach by the regime, the Minister of Finance presents the 2013-2014 draft budget to the Shura Council without making it available to citizens. Early this April and in complete secrecy, the Minister of Finance presented the 2013-2014 budget proposal to the Shura Council, without making it available publicly for citizens, neither on the ministry’s website nor in any other form of publication. The news was only announced early last week, in private newspapers such as Youm7 and ...

Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula: Introduction to the Roundtable

This electronic roundtable marks the one-year anniversary of Jadaliyya's Arabian Peninsula Page, in which time we have hosted work by activists, journalists, artists, and scholars that has made a significant intellectual—and, we hope, political—contribution. Despite the sophisticated, critical, and oft-politically engaged literature emerging from and about the Arabian Peninsula, however, the region remains marginalized, in multiple ways, within academic and popular analyses. Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula thus addresses the ways in which frameworks of knowledge production have not only obscured social realities there, but also contributed to their construction. While ...

Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Capital and Labor in the Gulf States: Bringing the Region Back In

[This is one of seven contributions in Jadaliyya's electronic roundtable on the symbolic and material practices of knowledge production on the Arabian Peninsula. Moderated by Rosie Bsheer and John Warner, it features Toby Jones, Madawi Al-Rasheed, Adam Hanieh, Neha Vora, Nathalie Peutz, John Willis, and Ahmed Kanna.] (1) Historically, what have the dominant analytical approaches to the study of the Arabian Peninsula been? How have the difficulties of carrying out research in the Arabian Peninsula shaped the ways in which knowledge is produced for the particular country/ies in which you have worked, and in the field more generally? My work has focused on the political ...

Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Perspectives from the Margins of Arabia

[This is one of seven contributions in Jadaliyya's electronic roundtable on the symbolic and material practices of knowledge production on the Arabian Peninsula. Moderated by Rosie Bsheer and John Warner, it features Toby Jones, Madawi Al-Rasheed, Adam Hanieh, Neha Vora, Nathalie Peutz, John Willis, and Ahmed Kanna.] (1) Historically, what have the dominant analytical approaches to the study of the Arabian Peninsula been? How have the difficulties of carrying out research in the Arabian Peninsula shaped the ways in which knowledge is produced for the particular country/ies in which you have worked, and in the field more generally? When I first began studying Arabic ...

Seeing How the Natives Live: On the Pitfalls and Potential of Alternative Tourism

People tuned into news from Palestine are often surprised to hear that one of the occupied West Bank’s main industries is tourism. Tourism has provided livelihoods for people in many cities in historic Palestine for centuries; there was even a tour guide’s guild in early Ottoman Jerusalem. Palestine has long been a destination for religious pilgrims, and particularly Christian tourists have continued making pilgrimages, constituting the vast majority of the tourists entering Israel and the West Bank every year. Despite the prominence of pilgrimage tours, recent decades have seen a rise in other forms of tourism to the West Bank. While alternative forms attract smaller ...

World Social Forum Highlights Shock Doctrine in Tunisia

An estimated fifty thousand people from five thousand organizations in 127 countries spanning five continents participated in the World Social Forum (WSF) in Tunisia over the past week. By choosing to come together in Tunis, this year’s Forum evoked the sprit of the 2011 revolt that inspired uprisings around the world. The WSF also focused attention on the complicated status of that revolt, which in Tunisia has not brought the political or economic changes many hoped for. Conversations with local activists often focused on the recent assassination of opposition leader Chokri Belaïd and government dealings with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Many in the ...