Dana El Kurd, "Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine" (Oxford UP, 2020)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · May 25, 2020 · 53m

What demobilizes a once mobilized society? How does international involvement amplify or suppress these dynamics? In Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine (Oxford University Press, 2020), Dana El Kurd’s new book uses a case study to interrogate how the Palestinian Authority – as an indigenous institution – more successfully demobilized Palestinian society than Israeli occupiers. Despite Israel’s greater resources and international backing, the Palestinian Authority, paradoxically, was able to accomplish what the Israelis could not: the polarization and…