Enduring Humanitarianism in the Palestinian Territories

Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (the West Bank and Gaza Strip) are among the highest recipients of per capita international humanitarian aid in the world. This talk will examine the enduring nature of Western aid to Palestine and how Palestinians endure their lives as humanitarian subjects. This reveals the paradoxes of humanitarianism in both facilitating and subverting colonial processes.

Sa'ed Atshan is associate professor of peace and conflict studies and anthropology and chair of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College. He has previously served as an associate professor of anthropology at Emory University; as a visiting assistant professor of anthropology and senior research scholar at the University of California, Berkeley; and as a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies.

Atshan earned a Ph.D. in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies and an M.A. in social anthropology from Harvard University, an M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a B.A. from Swarthmore College. Atshan is the author of “Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique” (Stanford University Press, 2020), coauthor (with Katharina Galor) of “The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians” (Duke University Press, 2020), and coeditor (with Galor) of “Reel Gender: Palestinian and Israeli Cinema” (Bloomsbury, 2022).   

Speaker opinions and statements are their own and do not imply endorsement by the MESP, Syracuse University, or its constituent schools and colleges.