The 1993 Oslo Accords aimed to achieve two objectives: institutionalise security arrangements and launch a securitised peace process. Security collaboration between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) represents the best illustration that operationalises these objectives. Consequently, the PA adopted donor-driven security sector reform (SSR) as the lynchpin to its post-2007 state-building project. As SSR proceeded, the occupied West Bank became a securitized space and the theater for PA security campaigns whose ostensible purpose was to establish law and order. Security campaigns in Balata and Jenin refugee camps are considered the showcases of the PA to testify its abilities to govern and implement the mantra of ‘one authority, one law, one gun’. Balata and Jenin were celebrated for transforming from places that ‘export terror’ to stable camps operating under the rule of law. However, a representative voice from these camps argues that ‘the security campaigns are like giving someone paracetamol to cure cancer’; a statement that summarizes the gap between the claims of authorities and the reality experienced by the people. This paper tackles the consequences of the PA’s security campaigns in both camps from the people’s perspective through a bottom-up ethnographic methodological approach based on sixty in-depth interviews. These voices from below problematize and examine the security campaigns, illustrating how and why resistance against Israel has been criminalized. The emerging tensions of the securitised processes of Oslo framework vis-à-vis the Palestinian state-building project manifested in authoritarian transformations, and therefore the security reform project constituted another form of institutionalised insecurity, but framed in a state-building and good governance framework. This manifests itself in the excessive use of arbitrary detention and torture in the PA’s prisons, as well as the minimal space for opposition voices in the Palestinian polity. These unorganized, incomplete, and ineffective security campaigns employed informal mechanisms to induce formality to the PA security forces in governing these camps. The ethnographic evidence suggests that the interaction between the securitised peace model of Oslo Accords and the PA’s state-building project aimed to silence, marginalize, and criminalize resistance against the Israeli occupation and its colonial dominance. The paper concludes by arguing that conducting security reform to ensure stability within the context of colonial occupation and without addressing the imbalances of power can only ever have two outcomes: “better” collaboration with the occupying power and a violation of Palestinians’ security and national rights by their own security forces.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Israel's military occupation in the Palestinian territories, prison continues to be an indivisible component of Palestinian existence and resistance. Tens of thousands were detained and imprisoned over the past decade; approximately 7000, almost all male, are currently being held in Israeli jails, among them men of diverse age groups, statuses, political affiliations and activism records. Their imprisonment causes much harm to their families, distresses their communities and overburdens the Palestinian authority, which continues to support them with its meager resources. Yet, while the "prisoners' issue" remains part and parcel of the Palestinian experience, the prisoners' movement – the organization of Palestinian political prisoners inside Israeli prisons - once a major pillar of the Palestinian national movement in the OPT, is enduring an ongoing decline. This is amply manifested by the absence of a central, representative prisoners' leadership, the repeated failures to organize and maintain collective prisoners' strikes, and the disintegration of the "education enterprise", formerly the "jewel in the crown" of the movement. Based on a socio-historical research (in progress) on the prisoners' movement and its changing impact on the political sphere in the OPT, my presentation attempts to point at underlying factors that affected the movement's decline. To that end I return to the establishment of the PNA in 1994 and to the state building process, albeit limited and circumscribed, which followed in its wake. Specifically I look at a) the incorporation of tens of thousands of former political prisoners – indeed a substantial portion of two generations of OPT activists - into the PNA's security apparatus and public administration, b) the accelerated development of higher education and its spread to all sectors of society, and c) the disintegration of popular formations and their displacement by NGOs. I argue that these processes contributed to the emergence of new social strata, which ultimately developed distinct inclinations, interests and aspirations, all of which distanced their constituent populations from militant activism against the Israeli occupation forces, and thereby also from imprisonment. At the same time, the rise of Hamas as a violent opponent of the Oslo scheme and fierce rival of the PNA led to an increased involvement of its (West Bank-based) members in armed action and hence to their further exposure to imprisonment. It is in light of these social and political transformations that prison has ceased to be a vital arena for a unified Palestinian struggle for independence.

The Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement, the political organization of Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israeli facilities, was once a unified movement where members of all Palestinian political factions cooperated on resistance activities. This unity was shattered in 2007 when clashes between Hamas and Fatah armed wings led to deaths and, subsequently, division between the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas and Fatah members, who once lived together in integrated wings, physically divided into separate sections. They developed separate internal governments and representatives to the prison authorities. Prison leaders’ attempts to reunify were rebuffed by outside political forces. This paper will look at the political and sociological drivers behind the separation, including competition over organizational leadership, as well as and divergent lifestyles. It will then briefly raise questions about the implications of the separation for collective resistance through a brief examination of subsequent collective resistance activities, including prisoners' unified refusal to wear orange uniforms, in 2008, and a 2012 hunger strike led primarily by one faction alone.  Fieldwork for this research was toward a PhD thesis from the Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland (forthcoming). The work explores how prisoners have understood their resistance, how Israeli authorities have attempted to counter it, and how the Palestinian political conditions, such as the creation of the Palestinian Authority and the rise of Islamic political parties, have both influenced and been influenced by the prisoners’ community. It is informed by themes developed in the criminological, social-psychological and sociological literature on resistance as well as a number of key international studies on politically-motivated prisoners’ communities. It uses the rich ethnographic and sociological work available on Palestinian politics and society to understand how prisoners’ resistance has evolved, reflected and shaped Palestinian resistance. Research utilized three types of data gathered over fieldwork in the West Bank conducted in 2014 and 2015: (1) over 40 recorded semi-structured interviews with released prisoners, lawyers, and leaders of prisoners’ defense organizations and dozens of informal or off-record discussions, conducted in both English and Arabic; (2) attendance at events such as demonstrations; and (3) Arabic-language first-person accounts of imprisonment, and published such as publications from Addameer, and academic theses available at the Abu Jihad Prisoners’ Library.

To what extent can ex-combatants meaningfully engage in peace-building in protracted conflicts and post-conflict contexts in the Middle East? What are the assets and liabilities that former fighters bring to peace-building initiatives, and what does their involvement look like in practice? What lessons from ex-combatant peace-building efforts in post-conflict settings are transferable to active conflicts? In this paper, we explore the role of former combatants in the case studies of Lebanon and Israel-Palestine. We first argue that, while former combatant involvement in peace-building is controversial, it is this same contentious identity that gives initiatives driven by ex-combatants the salience and leverage that other peace-building endeavours often lack, especially in communities that remain divided. Second, we argue that ex-combatant involvement in peace-building necessarily ‘looks different’ in every context, and especially requires different approaches in post-conflict and active-conflict environments. Lastly, we argue that ex-combatant peace-building is most effective when it does not strive for reconciliation per se, but rather when it advocates for nonviolent means of political struggle and critical dialogue, and when it is integrated with other elements of community development. The findings of the paper are based primarily on semi-structured interviews conducted by the authors with ex-combatants in Lebanon and Israel-Palestine from 2015-2017. The interviews seek to identify both individual and collective motivations, objectives, and experiences of ex-combatants with peace-building, and are coded and analysed to locate differences both within and between the case studies. As many of the participants in the study are members of the groups Fighters for Peace (Lebanon) and Combatants for Peace (Israel-Palestine), our findings also draw from participant observation at events hosted by both organisations in their respective locations. We situate our fieldwork findings in the interdisciplinary literatures on nonviolence, identity, and conflict transformation, as well as research on the roles of ex-combatants in other conflict contexts.