RGP Cycle One Grantees and Projects

Kareem Rabie: Palestine is Holding a Party and the Whole World is Invited: Housing Development, Privatization, and the Production of the State in the West Bank

My dissertation examines the current push towards privatization and state building in the West Bank through one of the region’s marquee mega-developments—-Rawabi, a new planned town north of Ramallah. Through ethnographic research among developers, representatives of financial capital, Palestinian Authority (PA) bureaucrats, ordinary Palestinians, and Israeli supporters and opponents of Rawabi, I analyze the material processes and affective qualities of the public/private state building and economic development project for Palestinians. That state building project explicitly imagines a Palestine tied to global markets as a way to minimize and overcome the structural effects of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Palestinian class aspiration and desires for normalcy and stability contribute to success and consensus around the state building project. My dissertation asks: what is the relationship of the state-in-formation to Israeli colonization and the political, economic, and territorial imperatives that come with it? How have individual politics among those living in the West Bank shifted as a result of geopolitical and geoeconomic restructuring? In a context of occupation and a focus on building industries that function with the free movement of capital and information, but do not require mobility for goods or people, what kind of state can emerge?

Kareem Rabie received his BA in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2002, and is currently completing his PhD in the Department of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His dissertation research examines the contemporary state-building project and push towards privatization in the West Bank through an ethnography of Rawabi, the largest development project thereto date. He has recently co-authored a chapter on Israeli settlers and human rights discourse, and co-edited a special issue of the journal Settler Colonial Studies.