The regulation of Palestinian everyday life: workshop proceedings

Since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Palestinian society has been subjected to multiple regulatory frameworks and normative rules enacted by a range of national and external actors and institutions. By regulatory frameworks, we mean forms and mechanisms of control within everyday life. These frameworks include Israeli occupation military regulations, Palestinian national laws and agendas of national and international non-governmental organisations, such as donor organisations. In November 2017, the LSE Middle East Centre and LSE Human Rights organised a workshop examining theoretical and methodological questions on ethnographic research in Palestine and the challenges of doing ethnography within a society affected by a continuous state of violence. This workshop is part of a collaborative research project with Birzeit University, which seeks to explore how Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are affected by complex regulatory and normative systems, and the ways in which they perceive and negotiate such frameworks in their everyday life. The workshop took an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together researchers to discuss their findings while addressing the project’s key research questions: (a) How do regulatory frameworks enable and constrain Palestinians in their daily lives? (b) How are these multi-layered regulatory frameworks perceived by Palestinians, and what are the discourses developed by them to engage with these frameworks? (c) How do neoliberal modes of governance influence the way these regulatory frameworks operate?