Join the Center for Palestine Studies for a talk with Kareem Rabie and Wassim Ghantous about Rabie's new book, Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank (Duke Press, 2021).
About Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited:
In 2008, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad invited international investors to the first-ever Palestine Investment Conference, which was designed to jump-start the process of integrating Palestine into the global economy. As Fayyad described the conference, Palestine is “throwing a party, and the whole world is invited.” In this book Kareem Rabie examines how the conference and Fayyad's rhetoric represented a wider shift in economic and political practice in ways that oriented state-scale Palestinian politics toward neoliberal globalization rather than a diplomatic two-state solution. Rabie demonstrates that private firms, international aid organizations, and the Palestinian government in the West Bank focused on large-scale private housing development in an effort toward state-scale economic stability and market building. This approach reflected the belief that a thriving private economy would lead to a free and functioning Palestinian state. Yet, as Rabie contends, these investment-based policies have maintained the status quo of occupation and Palestine's subordinate and suspended political and economic relationship with Israel. Read more
You can order the book from Duke (or, outside of North America, from CAP) for 30% off with code E21RABIE.
Kareem Rabie is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The University of Illinois, Chicago. His work focuses on privatization, urban development, and the state-building project in the West Bank.
Previously he was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC; Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago; and Marie Curie Fellow/Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS).
Kareem spent 2020-2021 on research leave supported by the ACLS, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Graham Foundation for Advancement in the Fine Arts, and was a visiting fellow at CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics; and Committee on Globalization and Social Change. Visit Kareem’s website.
Wassim Ghantous is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University. While at CPS Wassim is working on his book manuscript, The Rise of the Israeli War Machine: Palestinians’ Encounters of Spectral Violence, Destructive Velocities, Intensive Elimination. The book explores the increasingly diffused operations of the contemporary Israeli regime of colonization in rural areas of the West Bank – the “frontier zone” – and the ways in which Palestinians develop sumud (steadfastness) maneuvers to evade this diffused regime. Read more.
Wassim completed his Ph.D. in Peace and Development Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2020. In 2020-21 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG) located at the Faculty of Management and Business at the University of Tampere, Finland. SPARG is part of the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence in Research on the Relational and Territorial Politics of Bordering, Identities and Transnationalization. Previous to his academic career, he worked in several Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, most notably at the BADIL Resource Center and B’Tselem.