Karma Nabulsi has been awarded a three year British Academy UK-Middle East Capacity Sharing Partnership grant for `Teaching Contemporary Palestinian Political History: Setting a Collaborative Research Agenda and Building Capacity`, in partnership with universities in Gaza, Nablus, and Beirut.
This international programme builds capacity for teaching contemporary Palestinian political history, focusing on the three decade period that began with the establishment of the PLO in 1964 and ended with the signing of the Oslo agreements in 1993. Sources currently available for researching and teaching this history are extremely fragmentary in both thematic focus and range. Almost solely concerned with political elites and ideology, these sources give an extremely partial sense of the complex role and history of the plethora of institutions and vibrant political culture that developed in the course of the three ‘PLO decades`. These sources gloss over the pivotal experiences of mid and lower level cadres that formed the backbone of the Palestinian national liberation movement during that period. They also tend to be limited in geographic scope, failing to take account of the simultaneity of political work in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, and in refugee communities across the Mid East region.
The main challenge affecting scholars and teachers of this history is the dispersion of sources and the lack of critical reflection as to how they could be retrieved, reflected upon, and taught. It will: 1) survey archival and written documents; 2) construct an oral history database and 3) provide a venue for exploring appropriate conceptual tools, analytical frameworks, and comparative paradigms for approaching and teaching these sources. This will lay the foundations for an extensive research and teaching network bringing together scholars in Britain, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, as well as from other international institutions. It will draw extensively on the contribution of a number of distinguished scholars created in a previous British Academy sponsored network: Republicans Without Republics: National and International Networks in the Construction of State in 19th Century Europe
This project will run from December 2008 to November 2011.
Karma Nabulsi is University Lecturer in International Relations, Fellow in Politics, St Edmund Hall.
