The Palestinian Prisoners Movement: Resistance and Disobedience

Today we speak with scholar Julie Norman about her book, The Palestinian Prisoners Movement: Resistance and Disobedience. She is joined in conversation by her colleague and collaborator Amahl Bishara. Based on extensive interviews with Palestinian prisoners, Norman’s study delineates in detail and depth the centrality of the movement in the broader Palestinian national struggle. Palestinian prisoners took back the prison space for organizing and resistance, developing an internal "counterorder" to challenge authorities. We talk about how the Palestinian prisoners movement was both intertwined with the Palestinian national movement, and yet also prefigured modes of liberation beyond it.

Dr Julie Norman is an Associate Professor in Politics & International Relations at University College London (UCL), and a researcher/consultant on conflict, development, and political violence. She is also the Deputy Director of the UCL Centre on US Politics (CUSP), and a Senior Associate Fellow of International Security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

She is the author of five books and multiple articles on unarmed resistance, and she has published widely on conflict, activism, political prisoners, and political violence. She has worked as a practitioner with numerous NGOs in the Middle East and Africa, and she is a frequent commentator on the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and other media outlets.

Amahl Bishara is an associate professor of Anthropology, and of Studies of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University.  Bishara’s research revolves around expression, space, media, and settler colonialism. 

Her first book, Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford University Press 2013) is an ethnography of production of US news during the second Palestinian Intifada. It asks what we can learn about journalism and popular political action when we place Palestinian journalists at the center of an inquiry about U.S. journalism.

She is currently working on two book projects. One, addresses the relationship between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank, two groups that are positioned slightly differently in relation to Israeli settler-colonialism. Her second project examines Palestinian popular politics in a West Bank refugee camp.

Bishara regularly writes for such outlets as Jadaliyya, Middle East Report. She also produced the documentary "Degrees of Incarceration" (2010), an hour-long documentary that explores how, with creativity and love, a Palestinian community responds to the crisis of political imprisonment.