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UNRWA and Palestinian Refugee-ness: Material Bureaucracy and Political Potential
This thesis investigates the ways Palestine refugees and UNRWA engaged with the material objects of humanitarianism in the context of Palestinian displacement. In particular, the focus is on UNRWA’s basic ration program and the techniques of humanitarian governance illustrated by the use of ration c...
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AUC Knowledge Fountain
2025
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| Summary: | This thesis investigates the ways Palestine refugees and UNRWA engaged with the material objects of humanitarianism in the context of Palestinian displacement. In particular, the focus is on UNRWA’s basic ration program and the techniques of humanitarian governance illustrated by the use of ration cards that shaped and were shaped by the refugee population. The research asks how the ration card, as both a contested site of governmental rationality and object of political meaning-making, functioned as a technique for defining the Palestine refugee identity. To answer this question, the thesis draws on literature and conceptual work rooted in critiques of humanitarianism, governmentality and material bureaucracy. The thesis begins with a history of UNRWA’s own bureaucratic regime, followed by an exploration of the ways Palestine refugees leveraged ration cards within that regime to make political claims. The research then turns to the fragility of material bureaucracy in the Palestinian humanitarian context and implications for UNRWA’s authority over the refugee population, as well as the alternative forms of documentation discussed but never actualized. The thesis culminates in considering different forms of refugee resistance to UNRWA’s humanitarian governance as embodied in the ration card regime and engages with the tension between the humanitarian depoliticization of the Palestinian refugee space and the efforts of refugees themselves to exert a measure of agency in such conditions. Looking to the present moment, findings suggest that the contemporary threat to both Palestine refugees and UNRWA itself has its roots in the dynamics that arose during the Agency’s basic ration program between 1950 and 1982. |
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