Curating Sovereignty: Grassroots Organizations and Social Change in Palestine

• In Event: Repression to Regulation: The State & Civil Society Around the Globe

Abstract

This paper will examine how voluntary grassroots organizations (VGOs) in Palestine use heritage initiatives in realms of arts and culture and land cultivation to resist settler colonialism and neoliberalism and engage in nascent forms of citizen-led state building. Drawing upon nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine’s West Bank, the paper studies the heritage practices of three types of VGOs: 1) arts and culture groups, 2) agriculture groups, and 3) hiking and running groups. It argues that VGOs deploy heritage to claim Palestinian land, preserve cultural traditions, envision new futures, and assert a right to movement—all as part of a larger effort to resist political occupation and economic neoliberalism while empowering Palestinian citizens vis-a-vis the institutions that presently occupy and control them.

Scholars of Palestinian civil society find that many NGOs in Palestine serve as apparatuses of governing through which government and military rulers maintain the political status quo and international donors advance neoliberal economic principles and practices (Atia & Herrold, 2018; De Cesari, 2019; Wildeman & Tartir, 2014). The Palestinian Authority, Israeli occupying force, and international donors deploy regulations, bureaucracies, and global norms to depoliticize NGO work and channel it into activities that advance capitalist agendas (Jamal, 2007; Schulz & Suleiman, 2020). As a result, Palestine’s NGO sector constitutes primarily professional organizations that conduct discrete projects favored by governing elites (Brown, 2003). The proliferation of these NGOs has depoliticized much of Palestinian civil society and weakened the sector as an agent of social change.

This paper argues that another group of organizations in Palestine—namely, informal VGOs that operate outside of the NGO sector and without foreign donor assistance—are reclaiming civil society as a space of citizen mobilization, resistance, and emancipation. VGOs that conduct activities related to arts and culture and land cultivation build themselves upon voluntary member bases, connect divided people and geographies, and respond to the priorities of everyday citizens as a means of re-politicizing heritage practices specifically and the civic arena more generally.

The co-optation of civil society by governments and foreign donors is not unique to Palestine. A growing body of critical research shows how political and economic elites work through NGOs to exercise control over society and preserve an unjust status quo (Brumberg, 2002; Heurlin, 2010; Teets, 2014; Wiktorowicz, 2000). The recent proliferation of VGOs in Palestine reflects a more global trend of citizens resisting this co-optation of the civic sphere. Lessons from the Palestinian case will contribute to our broader theoretical understanding of contemporary forms and roles of civic activism and emancipation.

Author

• Catherine E. Herrold, Syracuse University