Job Announcement: Director of Research at Palestine EconomicPolicy Research Institute-MAS

Job Announcement: Director of Research at Palestine EconomicPolicy Research Institute-MAS

Job Announcement: Director of Research at Palestine EconomicPolicy Research Institute-MAS

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Vacancy: Director of Research


Palestine Economic Research Institute-MAS is seeking to employ a Senior Economist to supervise, as well as to undertake, policy-oriented research on the Palestinian economy, as Director of Research.

Position Overview


The Director of Research exercises both management and research functions, reporting to the Director General of the Institute. Activities within the Director of Research’s overall responsibilities include: conducting and supervising research projects, economic monitoring, mentoring interns and junior research staff, and organizing colloquia on ongoing research, workshops on research outcomes, roundtable meetings with stakeholders on topical issues, lectures, symposia, and conferences. 

The Director of Research will lead and oversee the research program, supervise assigned research staff, and work closely with the Director General and the External Relations Officer to help achieve the Institute’s fundraising goals. Successful candidates should be able to assume a leadership role in conducting and managing day-to-day operations for multiple research programs and projects with a keen eye on quality.

Job Posting


Duties and Responsibilities


In close coordination with the Director-General, the Director of Research will:

  • Help the Director General in preparing the Institute’s annual research plan and identify the needs of research programs.
  • Supervise research and scientific activities of the Institute
  • Lead high-quality and policy-oriented economic research relevant to the Palestinian economic and socio-economic conditions.
  • Supervise researchers, set their research tasks and individual employee goals, and provide regular evaluation of progress toward these goals.
  • Coordinate the work and assignments on specific research projects in cooperation with the lead researcher to ensure smooth flow of the project deliverables and the team’s adherence to deadlines and schedule for delivery of research outcomes.
  • Organize presentations of research, including at Roundtables, workshops, conferences and public meetings.
  • Identify and promote professional growth opportunities for staff.
  • Ensure adherence to professional standards and ethics of research.
  • Work in close cooperation with Research Department and other concerned administrative staff.
  • Represent MAS at public events and perform other related duties as assigned.

Qualifications

  • PhD degree in Economics, with at least 8 years of professional and institutional experience in policy-based research and scholarly publication (pre-and post-doctorate).
  • Strong analytical and quantitative skills, including expertise in macroeconomics, econometrics and modeling and the political economy of development.
  • Expert knowledge of economic and socio-economic conditions and policy making processes and institutional environment in Palestine.
  • Ability to lead and to communicate effectively and constructively with researchers and other staff at various levels.
  • Excellent Arabic and English writing skills and advanced computer skills.
  • Ability to think strategically, delegate responsibility, build consensus, and communicate effectively.

Organizational Competencies

  • Professionalism
  • Teamwork
  • Planning and organizing
  • Client Orientation

Managerial Competencies

  • Empowering Others
  • Managing Performance

Terms, Salary, and Benefits

  • MAS offers one-year renewable contracts and can consider a longer-term contract for the Director of Research position after the first year.
  • The salary is based on the unified scale of Palestinian universities with adjustments for differences in vacations and the sabbatical leave for senior academic ranks. A special administrative allowance may be available. Benefits include health insurance for staff (100%) and dependents (50%). Further details on contract terms, salary, academic equivalence and accommodation are available upon request.
  • Candidates must be able to reside legally in Palestine.
  • The appointment is made by decision of the Board of Trustees upon a recommendation from the Director General.

Location: MAS premises, Ramallah, West Bank, Palestine

Starting Date: As soon as possible.

Application

  • Interested candidates should send their CV and a cover letter elaborating on their interest in the position to jobs@mas.ps or by fax at +9722-2987055 no later than 31st January 2021.
  • Only CVs that fully meet the above Qualifications will be considered eligible.
  • A shortlist of eligible applicants will be invited for an online interview to assess the above qualifications, values, and competencies.


Click here for more information about the Institute.

Click here for more information about this position. 

 
The Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (M’ahad Abhath As-Syasat Al-Iqatisadiya Al-Filistini)-MAS was founded in 1994 as an independent, non-profit institution to undertake high-quality economic and socio-economic policy research. The Institute and its research activities aim to improve the understanding of the Palestinian economy, deal with the constraints to economic development, and explore the economic potential of Palestine. Its overall aim is to assist policy-makers in designing evidence-based policies and foster public participation in the formulation of economic and socio-economic policies. MAS’s areas of research cover various aspects of the Palestinian economy, including macroeconomic, trade, fiscal, monetary, financial sector, labor, social development and food security policies.
 

MAS is an Equal Opportunity Employer

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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