ISBN 978-0-7556-5083-5

Jørgen Jensehaugen

PRIO

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Resisting Domination in Palestine is a fascinating anthology, collecting a wide array of perspectives of domination enacted upon Palestinians. Unlike much existing work which focuses on violence, in the classic sense, this volume analyses the breadth of structural violence. Individual chapters engage with topics as varied as limitations on medical permits, challenges faced by ‘digital freelancers’, the fiscal policies of the Palestinian Authority, agrarian development and challenges of presenting a Palestinian perspective at Western universities. The chapters are all worthy of attention, making the book a valuable academic contribution. However, while delivering as promised on analyzing domination, far too few of the chapters engage with resistance. The intrinsic connection between domination and resistance is clearly debated and presented as a core framework in the introduction in a very promising manner, but as a whole this is not adequately present in the text. This is a pity because Palestinian resistance is far too often framed as violence while the cases discussed in the anthology are ones where Palestinian resistance takes other forms. That is often left implicit for the reader to understand, but not explicitly raised as a point of analysis. All of the chapters are framed within the settler colonial lens, and all of the chapters make a convincing argument for why the particular focus of that chapter needs to be understood within this perspective. While this makes sense for each of the individual chapters it makes the reading of the anthology as a whole unnecessarily tedious as the reader has to read this theoretical perspective outline each time.