Call for Proposals: Resilience in the Palestinian Case

Call for Proposals: Resilience in the Palestinian Case

Call for Proposals: Resilience in the Palestinian Case

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Recently, the term “resilience” has emerged as a popular discourse and tool, which can bridge the gap between humanitarian and development programming across conflict and disaster zones. While, traditionally resilience-based approaches are reserved for humanitarian crisis, more and more development agents refer to resilience as a key tool for their own long-term programming. To this end, UNDP PAPP is inviting scholars, practitioners and participants from the various sectors to discuss and debate the relevance and applicability of resilience-based approaches in the Palestinian case.

To this end, critical voices raise important questions – “ what is resilience?,” “ how can resilience support the Palestinian project of self-determination?,” “ how to build resilience in both policy and programming?,” “how to measure its impact?”, and “how to use resilience-based thinking to create economic opportunity?”

UNDP PAPP seeks to facilitate an internal-external discussion on resilience by including national and international stakeholders, key academics, policy-makers and advisors. In doing so, UNDP PAPP seeks to work with local and international stakeholders engaged in the Palestinian territories to define and ground resilience-based approaches in the delivery of our various-collective mandates and missions to assist the Palestinian people. Further, UNDP PAPP aims to open forum to existing organizations and agencies that work on resilience to share their knowledge, understanding and approach as a process of collective learning.

Resilience-based planning and strategizing holds the promise to bring together a scattered pool of stakeholders to think-plan-deliver effectively and efficiently in the interest of serving the Palestinian people. Therefore, UNDP PAPP invites individuals and organizations to formally submit position papers that tackle resilience, and its applicability to the Palestinian case. UNDP PAPP is currently accepting abstracts on topics related to the conference theme, with respect to the following panels:
 

Creating Economic Opportunity to Reduce Dependency?

1. How can planners in the realm of sustainable development work with the private sector to create economic opportunity which also supports reduced dependency. Give examples in the form of case study or refer to ongoing studies and assessment.
 

Reducing Unemployment by Creating Equal Access to Diverse Economic Opportunity

1. The role of higher education and vocational training to reduce unemployment. What is missing in policy and practice? 

2. Can entrepreneurship offer a solution for both unemployment and socio-economic issues in the Palestinian context?

Re-vising the Importance of Agriculture, Land, and the Environment in Resilience-based Development

1. How to build a resilient agriculture sector with limited resources?

2. What are the challenges of climate change and environmental degradation?


Livelihoods and Vulnerabilities : How can Resilience-based Programming Contribute to Sustainable Development ( SDGs)?

1. How can resilience-based approaches strengthen the resilience of Palestinians to remain on their lands? Explore the particular case of Palestinian communities in Area C,  East Jerusalem and/or Gaza. 


Reversing Fragmentation: Building Resilience Through Spatial-Planning

1. Explore the links between planning and resilience across urban settings in the Palestinian territories. What are the current gaps and what are the opportunities?

2. How to sustainably manage natural resources across under-developed areas in the West Bank? Explore key regions in Area C, linking private development to long-term sustainable livelihoods.

3. How to build better in Gaza with ‘protection’ in mind? Develop on existing recovery and rehabilitation efforts by identifying the gaps in policy and practice.
 

Deadlines and Selection Process

  • Participants will be selected based on evaluation of abstracts of 200-500 words.
  • Deadline for submission of abstracts is June 10th, 2016.
  • Selected authors will be notified by June 30th , 2016.
  • Final papers to be presented are due July  20th , 2016.
  • Individuals who have not submitted final papers by the deadline will not be included in the final program.
  • A select number of papers will be considered in a post-conference UNDP PAPP publication. Original authors will have the opportunity to revise their papers to incorporate feedback from the conference prior to official publishing.
  • To submit, please send your abstract with the following in the subject line “ Resilience Conference Abstract” , addressed to Lamya Hussain at : lamya.hussain@undp.org. Please include your CV and a short bio. 
  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      In this episode of Long Form, Hala Rharrit discusses the factors that led her to resign from the US State Department, the mechanisms by which institutional corruption and ideological commitments of officials and representatives ensure US support for Israel, and how US decision-makers consistently violate international law and US laws/legislation. Rharrit also addresses the Trump administration’s claim that South Africa is perpetrating genocide against the country’s Afrikaaner population, and how this intersects with the US-Israeli campaign of retribution against South Africa for hauling Israel before the ICJ on charges of genocide.

    • Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      The entire globe stands behind Israel as it faces its most intractable existential crisis since it started its slow-motion Genocide in 1948. People of conscience the world over are in tears as Israel has completely run out of morals and laws to violate during its current faster-paced Genocide in Gaza. Israelis, state and society, feel helpless, like sitting ducks, as they search and scramble for an inkling of hope that they might find one more human value to desecrate, but, alas, their efforts remain futile. They have covered their grounds impeccably and now have to face the music. This is an emergency call for immediate global solidarity with Israel’s quest far a lot more annihilation. Please lend a helping limb.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      In this episode, Mandy Turner discusses the vital role think tanks play in the policy process, and in manufacturing consent for government policy. Turner recently published a landmark study of leading Western think tanks and their positions on Israel and Palestine, tracing pronounced pro-Israel bias, where the the key role is primarily the work of senior staff within these institutions, the so-called “gatekeepers.”

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412