Author Archives: Ilana Feldman

About Ilana Feldman

Associate professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University. She is the author of Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917-67 (Duke, 2008) and In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care, co-edited with Miriam Ticktin (Duke, 2010). Her current research traces the Palestinian experience in humanitarianism in the years since 1948, exploring both how this aid apparatus has shaped Palestinian social and political life and how the Palestinian experience has influenced the broader post-war humanitarian regime.

The Humanitarian Condition: Palestinian Refugees and the Politics of Living

An exploration of the politics of living with and in a humanitarian condition. Rather than looking at humanitarian responses to moments of crisis, it considers the case of Palestinian refugees—who live in conditions of long-term displacement and who receive assistance from a long-standing humanitarian apparatus—to investigate the forms of political expression that emerge in these conditions. The article explores political values articulated both through rights claims and existential conditions and argue that even as humanitarianism can constrain action in certain ways it also provides mechanisms through which people are active in the world.