Venue: Institute of Palestine Studies, 
19 Emile Habibi Street, Al-Masion, Ramallah

Institutional participants invited to the workshop

• IPCC Independent Palestinian Citizenship Committee
• Muwatin
• Badil in Bethlehem
• Al Haq
• Mada Carmel

Scientific Coordinators

• Claire Beaugrand (Ifpo)
• Carol Khoury (IPS)
• Stéphanie Latte Abdallah (CNRS-Ifpo)
• Majdi Al Malki (IPS).

Format of the sessions

• Working language: English
• 16-18h00.
• 40 mn presentation including around 10 mn of discussion of a theoretical paper deemed essential to write the presented work.
• 1h20 debate and exchange with the participants.
• Thanks for sending paper and theoretical text ONE WEEK prior to the date of the scheduled presentation.

Rationale

Citizenship studies have opened new avenues to think about citizenship beyond the legal bond to, and attributed by, a sovereign state: they theorised a way of being citizen that is appropriated and claimed by the subject itself. In particular, Engin Isin developed the concept of “acts of citizenship”, which he defines as “those constitutive and disruptive moments when rights are claimed, responsibilities asserted and obligations imposed”. Understood as a gap between the citizenship in law and the citizenship in practice, acts of citizenship—by which an individual constitute himselve/herselve into a citizen—occur among various groups (of different national status) and at different scales. More often than not, alternative forms of making politics and community belonging transcend formal rights and duties whether political or socio-economic (such as electing representative bodies, access to public employment, military service, holding of a passport) and take multiple forms of ‘informal modes of belonging’, that can include a cultural dimension. In the Middle East, the so-called Arab springs rekindled the interests of scholars in the study of citizenship by using a new repertoires of political contentious actions.

In this seminar, new perspectives on citizenship will be assessed and read critically by resituating their production against the background of the pervasive neo-liberal narrative of the state’s retreat, on the one hand and the questioning of the nation-state on the other. 
For instance, Aihwa Ong (Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, Duke University Press, 1999) coined the term of “flexible citizenship” to refer to the resilience of the Chinese diaspora’s national bound while navigating multiple immigration regimes. Neha Vora (Impossible Citizens: Dubai's Indian Diaspora, Durham, Duke University Press, 2013) describes a “consumer citizenship”, by which the Indian diaspora in Dubai, conceived above all as primarily economic migrants, exceeds the economic to express deeper modes of belonging to the city and the place that refuses them nationality.

This research seminar aims at studying the “acts of citizenship” in Palestine and, by maintaining a comparative approach, assesses the robustness of these theories in the particular context of occupation. What forms of citizenship are conceived, and experienced under the circumstances of territorial discontinuity, population dispersal—inside as well as outside of historical Palestine, spotty and multiple sovereignties, in the absence or on the margins of the state? What acts of citizenship can we identify? What forms of alternative, localised, virtual, claimed and contested citizenships do emerge? To whom are these claims addressed in terms of political authorities, at which institutional scale, state or para-statal bodies? 
The objective will be to identify and analyse practices and discourses that form the basis for a collective action that claim to be “citizen actions”. The seminar’s outputs will partly build on the international conference on “Glocal Palestine: Life, Consumption, Action” held in October 2014. The conference’s themes include the use and practices of the Human rights discourse, new political movements in relation with sexualities, new uses of law, sustainable development, the rise of the “organic” label and “made in Palestine” or baladi trademarks, alternative tourism as well as local and artistic mobilisations and new digital forms of political actions.

Agenda 2014/2015

• September, Wed 24
  Lauren BANKO, SOAS, UK
  « The state of Palestinians wherever they may be »: the development of Palestinian nationality and citizenship
• October, Wed 29
  Dr. Emilio DABED, Al Quds/Bard College
  Law, Identity, and Citizenship in contemporary Palestine. The role of law in the re-making of Palestinian nationhood
• November, Wed 26
  Dr. Elisabeth LONGUENESSE, University of Versailles Saint-Quentin
  Questioning Citizenship between Conceptualisation and Translation
• December, Wed 17
  Dr. Joni AASI, An-Najah University
  Citizenship and the right to Return in the Case of Palestinians inside Palestine (in Arabic)
• January, Wed 21
  Prof Engin ISIN, Open University, UK
  Theoretical session
• February, Wed 18
  Dr. Claire BEAUGRAND, Ifpo, OPT
  Biduns’ Acts of Citizenship: An Sociolgical History of the Movements in Defense of the Cause. From Kuwaiti to Self Organised Movements, From Papers and Rights and to Questionnig the National Belonging
• March, Wed 11
  Kim Jezabel ZINNGREBE, SOAS, UK
  (Re-) Occupying Marginal Space: Contemporary Perceptions and Practices of ‘Citizenship’ among Palestinian Women Activists in Israel
• April, Wed 22
  Speaker tbc
  Stéphanie LATTE ABDALLAH
• May, Wed 27
  Dr. Mutaz QAFISHEH, Hebron University 
  “The Citizenship of the State of Palestine: International Justice and Political Reality”
• June, Wed 10
  NO PARTICIPANT
  Informal meeting/ Wrap up session with Uri DAVIS (not advertised)