Exploring the evolution of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), this book fills a lacuna in literature on the agency. UNRWA and Palestinian Refugees employs recent fieldwork in order to analyse challenges in programmes and service delivery, protection, camp governance, community participation, and camp improvement and reconstruction. The chapters examine the way UNRWA is adapting to a changing social, political and economic context, mostly within urban settings – a paradigmatic shift from understanding the Agency’s role as simply a provider of relief and services to one comprehensively supporting the human development of Palestinian refugees. Examining the refugee debate using new disciplines and research frameworks, this collection aims to emphasise the centrality of the Palestinian refugee issue for Middle East peace-making and to contribute a better understanding of a unique agency. This book will be a useful aid for students and researchers with an interest in Middle East Studies, Politics, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Palestinian conflict has produced one of the most tragic refugee crises since World War II, with the number of refugees caused by the violence associated with the creation of the State of Israel numbering around 11 million in 2011. The much lauded first edition, in 1998, of The Status of Palestinian Refugees in International Law was the first book to comprehensively analyse the legal aspects of the Palestinian refugee crisis, yet the last two decades have seen multiple developments. New waves of conflict and displacement have affected Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, and there has been Israeli encroachment on Palestinian territory. Hamas has grown, and a schism has formed within the first Palestinian government. The so-called "Arab Spring" has impacted the life, fate, and legal status of thousands of Palestinian refugees. In international legal jurisprudence, change has been similarly rapid. In 2004, the International Court of Justice delivered a crucial advisory opinion on the Separation Wall, authoritatively elucidating the international legal framework applicable to the Israeli occupation. Numerous international human rights bodies and UN fact-finding missions have added their analysis to the mix. The possibility of the State of Palestine joining the International Criminal Court has spurred discussion relating to the applicability of international criminal law to Palestinian refugees. Clear, compelling, and authoritative, Lex Takkenberg and Francesca Albanese discuss the status quo both on the ground and in the courts, and pose future scenarios to come.

Based on four years of field research in Palestinian camps in Jordan - including unique interviews with Palestinian refugee women, aid workers, and representatives of international organisations and NGOs in Jordan - the book reveals the extraordinary layers of discrimination suffered by Palestinian women from Syria displaced to Jordan. The women's experiences show them caught between settler colonialism, militarism, nationalism, refugees' global governance and gender regimes that subjected them to multiple forms of structural gender-based violence. The book argues for a feminist analysis of settler colonialism's epistemic violence of anti-Palestinianism to expose the history and geopolitics of intersecting oppressive systems that work through and upon gendered bodies of Palestinian refugee women in humanitarian settings. The book also highlights how local women's groups and frontline workers attempt to fill service gaps. Using a rich theoretical lens to understand the experiences of women in refugee camps, this book attempts to decolonise issues around migration, displacement, refugees and women. Previous work on the Syrian refugee crisis has overlooked the very particular experiences of Palestinian refugee women, which has weakened feminist analysis of gendered processes of humanitarianism, and feminist transnational and intersectional solidarity. This book offers a vital critique of how feminists' adoption of a universality-based analysis of the Syrian refugee crisis has contributed to the further marginalisation of Palestinian refugee women from Syria.

In the decades after World War II, the United Nations established a global refugee regime that became central to the lives of displaced people around the world. This regime has exerted particular authority over Palestinian refugees, who are served by a specialized UN body, the Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Formed shortly after the 1948 war, UNRWA continues to provide quasi-state services such as education and health care to Palestinian refugee communities in the Middle East today. This book is a groundbreaking international history of Palestinian refugee politics. Anne Irfan traces the history and politics of UNRWA’s interactions with Palestinian communities, particularly in the refugee camps where it functioned as a surrogate state. She shows how Palestinian refugees invoked internationalist norms to demand their political rights while resisting the UN’s categorization of their plight as an apolitical humanitarian issue. Refuge and Resistance foregrounds how nonelite activism shaped the Palestinian campaign for international recognition, showing that engagement with world politics was driven as much by the refugee grass roots as by the upper echelons of the Palestine Liberation Organization. It demonstrates that refugee groups are important actors in global politics, not simply aid recipients. Recasting modern Palestinian history through the lens of refugee camps and communities, Refuge and Resistance offers vital new perspectives for understanding politics beyond the nation-state.

This Handbook provides a broad overview of Palestinian history, society, politics, and culture across different contexts and periods, revealing the rich and varied dimensions of Palestine. To capture the diversity of Palestinian scholarship and to introduce readers to a mix of approaches and perspectives, both internationally established and emerging Palestinian scholars have contributed. The Handbook attempts to avoid narrowly framing Palestine around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, incorporating postcolonial approaches attentive to a broader range of (hitherto overlooked) actors. While a significant proportion of the Handbook examines the contemporary period, it is divided up into four sections that together provide a detailed overview of the main developments in the region: A historical section that contextualizes the complex historical formation of contemporary Palestine – perhaps best regarded as a country but not yet a state A section exploring the society, geography, economy, and identity of Palestine A section on the political significance of Palestine, covering the dynamics between Jewish nationalism (Zionism) and Palestinian nationalism A final section on culture, touching on architecture, literature, music, cuisine, education, and contemporary art Providing a deep analysis of the Palestinian perspective, the Handbook will prove valuable reading for anyone interested in the history, politics and society of Palestine and the Middle East.

This thoroughly revised and updated edition is the most comprehensive and detailed reference ever published on United Nations. The book demystifies the complex workings of the world's most important and influential international body.

Examining the development of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinian refugee issue, this book spans the period following the first Arab-Israeli War until the mid-1950s, when the basic principles of Israel’s policy were finalized. Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Issue outlines and analyzes the various aspects that, together, created the mosaic of the "refugee problem" with which Israel has since had to contend. These aspects include issues of repatriation, resettlement, compensation, blocked bank accounts, internal refugees and family reunification. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book uses documents from Israeli government meetings, from the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and files from the office of the Prime Minister’s advisor on Arab affairs to address the many diverse aspects of this topic, and will be essential reading for academics and researchers with an interest in Israel, the Middle East, and political science more broadly.

This book describes the potential and challenges of cosmopolitanism from a philosophical and historical point of view. Through the prism of cosmopolitanism, this book considers how the recent surge in migration is affecting our current reality, while also taking stock of the contemporary potential of cosmopolitan ideas. It considers and compares the significance of religion and culture for the wider societal acceptance or rejection of refugees. Moreover, the book examines the European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence on immigration policies, non-refoulement, humanitarian law and gender. It presents empirically based research of a quantitative, qualitative and comparative nature regarding the determinants of attitudes towards cosmopolitanism and more generally concerning public opinion on migration issues, and reflects on conceptions of and attitudes towards citizenship, while also imagining new forms of citizenship. This book serves as a comprehensive overview and resource for migration scholars from the social sciences and the humanities, as well as students and other stakeholders in the fields of migration and human rights.

This Handbook draws together leading and emerging scholars to provide a comprehensive critical analysis of international refugee law. This book provides an account as well as a critique of the status quo, setting the agenda for future research in the field.