What is the effect of social cohesion on violent strategies? Previous literature has argued that a higher level of social cohesion predisposes groups to non-violent strategies, whereas a low level of social cohesion makes it difficult to maintain adherence to non-violence. This paper explores this debate by looking at the impact of social cohesion on preferences for violence versus non-violence in unstable institutional environments. In particular, I focus on the Palestinian territories, where the Palestinian Authority consistently struggles with maintaining legitimacy and coherence in an increasingly hostile international environment. The paper utilizes a survey experiment with a priming component, using a nationally representative sample from both the West Bank and Gaza. Preliminary results show that three variables increase the preference for violent strategies in comparison to nonviolent strategies: being present in Gaza, affiliation with a political party, and political grievance. Specifically, a sense that the government is unresponsive to the public increases the preference for violent strategies. On the other hand, the various measures of social cohesion are not statistically significant. This would imply that a preference for violent strategy is perhaps not determined by the level of social cohesion or an individual’s social embeddedness, as once presumed.

Like other struggles around the world, the future of the Palestinian struggle is likely to involve a substantial ‘cyber’ component. This raises the question of whether Palestinian civil society organizations -- the presumptive vanguard of any grassroots social movement -- are taking the requisite security precautions to defend against cyberattacks. In this essay we take a first step towards answering this question by scripting a non-intrusive web scanning tool to build security telemetry for a sample of websites belonging to Palestinian think tanks, NGOs, and news agencies. Specifically, we assemble a checklist covering various aspects of website security for which there exists a wide professional consensus on best practices. We then scan each Palestinian website in our sample to see how they fare on each of these dimensions. For comparison’s sake, we also scan a sample of websites corresponding to American civil society organizations. Our findings paint a troubling picture, but one which we hope will encourage a dialogue with Palestinian civil society, and inspire further research in this increasingly relevant area.

Does experiencing critical political events during the transition from youth to adulthood produce distinctive and lasting political attitudes? We test for such cohort effects among Palestinians who came of age during the First Intifada against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. We examine views toward those Palestinian Authority (PA) institutions that were created following this historic mass mobilization. At the time, these institutions were viewed, alternatively, as a source of hope for Palestinian self-determination or as a betrayal of the national cause. We analyze a pooled sample of 19 surveys conducted by the Center for Palestinian Research and Studies between 1996 and 2000 (n = 25,061). We find that men of the “First Intifada generation” are more likely than women of the same cohort and men of other cohorts to negatively characterize select PA institutions and to perceive the PA as corrupt. We further investigate how party affiliation conditions these results. Subsequently, we employ surveys from two later periods – during the Second Intifada (2001-2005), and after the political division of the West Bank and Gaza (2007-2016) – to examine whether the First Intifada cohort's views remain distinctive. This research clarifies how exposure to, and participation in, grass-roots resistance shapes views toward political institutions in an environment of enduring conflict and statelessness.

This paper examines how Palestinian social change actors negotiate Western foreign aid interventions. It argues that, rather than passively accepting foreign aid, social change actors display a range of responses including accepting aid, manipulating aid in their own interest, and evading aid. Social change actors’ agency in the foreign aid regime has implications for our understanding of the effects of Western intervention on Palestinian civil society. The Western aid that flowed to Palestine after the 1993 Oslo Accords significantly transformed Palestinian civil society. Prior to Oslo, Palestinian civil society was rooted in grassroots communities and consisted primarily of charities, self-help groups, popular committees, and social movements and have been credited with laying the groundwork for the first and second intifadas. The foreign aid that arrived after Oslo constructed a sector of professional, project-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have been widely criticized as being tools of the West, disconnected from local citizens, and ineffective agents of change. But to write off Palestine’s NGO sector and the larger civil society of which it is a part as debilitated by foreign aid risks overlooking the ways in which Palestinian social change actors negotiate Western aid interventions. Drawing upon one year of ethnographic research in the West Bank, this paper analyzes how two groups of Palestinian social change actors respond to foreign aid: 1) employees of NGOs, which rely on foreign aid for survival, and 2) members of Voluntary Grassroots Organizations (VGOs), which operate largely outside of the foreign aid system but interact with it in various ways. I argue that social change actors affiliated with each type of organization face distinct sets of opportunities and constraints when confronting foreign aid and I analyze how these opportunities and constraints shape social change actors’ responses to foreign aid—responses which, I argue, range from passive acceptance to creative manipulation to outright rejection of aid. By examining social change actors’ agency in the face of Western intervention, this paper contributions to our understanding of the effects of foreign aid on civil society as well as the emancipatory potential civil society even when confronted with foreign aid regimes.