During the last twenty years, Palestinian women have practiced creative and often informal everyday forms of political activism. Sophie Richter-Devroe reflects on their struggles to bring about social and political change.

Richter-Devroe's ethnographic approach draws from revealing in-depth interviews and participant observation in Palestine. The result: a forceful critique of mainstream conflict resolution methods and the failed woman-to-woman peacebuilding projects so lauded around the world. The liberal faith in dialogue as core of "the political" and the assumption that women's "nurturing" nature makes them superior peacemakers, collapse in the face of past and ongoing Israeli state violences.

Instead, women confront Israeli settler colonialism directly and indirectly in their popular and everyday acts of resistance. Richter-Devroe's analysis zooms in on the intricate dynamics of daily life in Palestine, tracing the emergent politics that women articulate and practice there. In shedding light on contemporary gendered "politics from below" in the region, the book invites a rethinking of the workings, shapes, and boundaries of the political.

| Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration and List of Arabic Terms Abbreviations Introduction: From Revolutionary Activism to Informal Politics 1: Women's Peacebuilding: UNSCR 1325 and the Post-Oslo Peace Supermarket 2: Women's Popular Resistance: Embodied Protest and Political Claim Making 3: Women's Everyday Resistance and the Infrapolitics of Sumud: "Yes, we came here to enjoy!" Conclusion: Reclaiming Humanity and the Politics of Women's Everyday Life in Occupied Palestine Appendix Notes Bibliography Index |"Women's Political Activism in Palestine is remarkable for its attention to detail that is skillfully pitched to appeal both to readers with interests in women's activism more generally and to those with a deeper regional knowledge specific to Palestine. . . . A thought-provoking text that sits among the finest social scientific works on contemporary Palestine in recent years." —LSE Review of Books
"This highly engaging book poses new questions about Palestinian women's activism in Occupied Palestine, in light of the failure of the Oslo process, ongoing and intensifying Israeli colonization, dispossession and violent repression, and the absence of an effective and legitimate Palestinian national leadership." —Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies
"The author has succeeded in achieving the aim of analysing and generating a better understanding of micro-level politics as represented in Palestinian women's everyday practices." —Women's Studies International Forum
|Sophie Richter-Devroe is an associate professor in the Middle Eastern Studies Department at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, and an honorary fellow at the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. She is the coeditor of Gender, Governance, and International Security and of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, "Palestine beyond National Frames: Emerging Politics, Cultures and Claims."