Palestinian Refugees

The conflict over Palestine has produced one of the most tragic and compelling refugee crises of the post Second World War era. In the Palestinian-Israeli Declaration of Principles, signed at Washington, DC, in 1993, the fate of the 3.4 million Palestinian refugees was identified as one of the outstanding issues to be addressed in subsequent negotiations. This book explores the status of Palestinian refugees in international law focusing both on the position of Palestinians in the Arab world and in Western countries. It contains a thorough and useful analysis of various areas of international law, including refugee law, the law relating to stateless persons, humanitarian law, and human rights law, and probes their relevance to the provision of international protection for Palestinian refugees within the context of the Middle East peace process.

Anthropology has traditionally relied on a spatially localized society or culture as its object of study. The essays in Culture, Power, Place demonstrate how in recent years this anthropological convention and its attendant assumptions about identity and cultural difference have undergone a series of important challenges. In light of increasing mass migration and the transnational cultural flows of a late capitalist, postcolonial world, the contributors to this volume examine shifts in anthropological thought regarding issues of identity, place, power, and resistance.

This collection of both new and well-known essays begins by critically exploring the concepts of locality and community; first, as they have had an impact on contemporary global understandings of displacement and mobility, and, second, as they have had a part in defining identity and subjectivity itself. With sites of discussion ranging from a democratic Spain to a Puerto Rican barrio in North Philadelphia, from Burundian Hutu refugees in Tanzania to Asian landscapes in rural California, from the silk factories of Hangzhou to the long-sought-after home of the Palestinians, these essays examine the interplay between changing schemes of categorization and the discourses of difference on which these concepts are based. The effect of the placeless mass media on our understanding of place -- and the forces that make certain identities viable in the world and others not -- are also discussed, as are the intertwining of place-making, identity, and resistance as they interact with the meaning and consumption of signs.

Contesting the classical idea of culture as the shared, the agreed upon, and the orderly, the contributorsconsider the complex and sometimes ironic political processes through which cultural forms are imposed, invented, reworked, and transformed. An important intervention in the discipline of anthropology, Culture, Power, Place wil

"Recommended." Library Journal "A tour de force. This is by far the best single work on Palestine before its destruction & the Palestinians since that tragedy. It should be required reading for everyone concerned with understanding the background & future of the seemingly intractable question of Palestine." Cheryl Rubenberg Florida International University