Control of education in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) was transferred from the Israeli Civil Administration to the Palestinian National Authority in 1994. Scholarship covering the educational reality in the OPT in the lead up and immediate aftermath of this period generally falls into two categories: education policy reports and historical accounts. In the policy category, scholars typically have focused on the idea of "quality" education, but have dehistoricized "quality" as an objective term rather than as an inherently local, political, and temporally malleable development concept. Meanwhile, in the history category, many historians have uncritically adopted value-laden education language when describing the historical logistics of Palestinian education, unwittingly reifying the "west knows best" mentality of international development while also failing to account for the wide variety of organizations and peoples involved in the educational reality of the territories. In other words, most literature on late twentieth century Palestinian education has failed to recognize that "notions of knowledge" cannot be "disconnected" from the power structures that devised them (Mazawi 2010, 22). Thus, this paper aims to bridge and critique these two bodies of Palestinian education literature by using a historical lens to trace the many changing visions of education held by the wide variety of stakeholders who had a hand in developing Palestinian education through the 1980s and 1990s. In order to paint a comprehensive picture, this paper draws upon original research conducted in the UNESCO and World Bank archives. It will also incorporate ethnographic interviews with Palestinian students, teachers, and other education affiliated employees in the West Bank in order to localize ideas of education success. This research thus explores how the various education ideologies complemented, contradicted, and competed to shape the complicated terrain of the Palestinian education system. Ultimately, the paper argues that in this competition of ideas, the aims of international organizations often overshadowed the aspirations of local Palestinians for two main reasons. First, as Palestinian goals were tied to resistance, they were difficult to quantify, a key trait for the international education regime. Second, resistance directly opposed the security goals of international funders like the United States. Thus, this paper calls into question the normative descriptions used in historical writings about Palestinian education while adding to the growing body of literature that challenges the underlying assumptions of development ideologies and organizations.

A common theme in the development policy discourse about education, youth and unemployment in the Arab world is that of “skills mismatch.” For over two decades, researchers and policy makers have regularly made the claim that young people in the Arab world are not gaining the skills needed for employment in the “knowledge economy” through existing educational institutions. Policy makers point to the apparent skills mismatch as both the reason for poor economic growth and unemployment, as well as evidence of the poor quality of education in the region.  The concept of skills mismatch is most pervasive in the steady stream of international educational development documents produced about education in the Arab world. At times the causal reasoning is explicit, with unemployment rates used as a proxy measure of educational quality (e.g., Brookings 2014). Yet the assumption that the quality of education is the cause of high rates of unemployment is often presented as truth with little to no empirical evidence. More troubling, is that the discussion of skills mismatch and educational systems in the region, often lacks analysis of prevailing labor force dynamics and barriers to economic development beyond, tedious, and at times orientalist, characterizations of Arab workers as slow to change in their expectations. Another glaring gap in this discourse is a failure to address the role of structural inequality, class-based social capital and the growing educational inequality that undergirds the socio-economic realities of youth in the Arab world, as it does everywhere. This paper undertakes a genealogy of the skills mismatch discourse, tracing its roots in labor economics and human capital driven theories of educational development, to its use as an explanatory framework for the failures of structural adjustment programs. Examining the discourse on Jordan in particular—and Jordanian youth and education—I show how the skills mismatch discourse is deployed by policy makers, at the national and global levels, to place the responsibility for rampant unemployment and inequality squarely on the shoulders of the local education system (teachers and educational administrators). At the same time, this policy discourse asserts that youth are responsible for finding their own solutions by innovating, being entrepreneurial, and making better choices. To assist them in this process, a plethora of “skills” providing initiatives and institutions have emerged to both address the “lack of quality education” and to deliver the promise of skills, if not stable employment, for a new generation.

As a response to the high levels of economic vulnerability among citizens and refugees in Lebanon, the Government of Lebanon, along with international and national partners, devised the 2017-2020 Lebanon Crisis Response Plan (LCRP). The LCRP aims to “respond to these challenges in a holistic, comprehensive manner through longer term, multi-year planning” (Government of Lebanon and the United Nations 2019). Though the LCRP frames the Lebanese government as a highly invested actor, the government has struggled to provide a detailed policy vision and leadership. As a result, municipalities as well as local and international organizations have led the response. Building on Ferguson and Gupta’s concept of transnational governmentality (2002), this paper explores the process through which state and non-state governmentality feature in the LCRP. This paper draws on the case of a recent cash transfer program in Lebanon that took place between 2017 and 2019 and was designed as an integral part of the LCRP. The cash transfer program was funded by the United Kingdom Department for International Development and implemented by the United Nations World Food Program. Although the program was initially conceptualized to harmonize the funding and programming of multiple short-term humanitarian and longer-term, state-led development programs targeting Lebanese citizens and Syrian refugees, it evolved to focus purely on short-term humanitarian relief for Syrian refugees. Drawing on textual analysis of program reports and ethnographic research conducted in Lebanon with development workers involved in the planning and implementation of the cash transfer program, this paper traces the program's evolution to illustrate how disparate institutional priorities and negotiations over planning shaped the final design of the program. This paper explores how different actors understand their role in the current configuration of the transnational aid system in Lebanon. In doing so, this paper illuminates how the apparent division between state and non-state aid provision is produced through development and humanitarian discourses and practices. Furthermore, this paper analyzes the effects of this purported state/non-state division on the Lebanese government’s response to social, political and economic insecurity.

In 2012 the village of Tasneem in the Egyptian Nile Delta governorate of Al-Daqahliya claimed "administrative independence" from the state on the grounds of state neglect of the provision and upkeep of essential infrastructure services. The village youth movement activists cited the absence of a paved road, a school, a mosque, and a medical unit as reasons for their attempted secession from the state. The village citizens in return provided the majority of the infrastructural services themselves, building them with their own expertise from construction labor, and funding through migrant remittances. Tasneem was a new village created in the 1950s, following President Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab socialist land reform and land redistribution state projects. Infrastructure development was a central argument in the state's village creation. Through a focus on infrastructure as state-making, ruination as state-neglect, and reconstruction as citizenship-claiming, this presentation examines how infrastructural development projects became sites of sovereignty-claiming between rural citizens and the state in rural Egypt over the material-built environment.