Palestinian Refugees of the Oslo Generation: Thinking beyond the Nation?
Keywords: 
generation
decolonization
nation-state
Oslo accords
Palestinian refugees
translocality
sovereignty
terriotoriality
Abstract: 

This article analyzes the political narratives and critiques of young Palestinian refugees who have grown up in the bleak post-Oslo period. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted with refugee youth in Jordan and the West Bank between 2009 and 2014, I show that this generation of refugees endorses a collective Palestinian identity and peoplehood with claims to the (home)land while also narrating their identities and relations to land, nation, state, and rights as complex, multifaceted, and fractured. Their political imaginaries do not limit the political and epistemic project of decolonizing Palestine to the classic paradigm of a territorialized nation-state as enshrined in the Oslo two-state agenda. Rather, they point to a creative and radical, post-nation-statist, translocal politics for Palestine.

Author biography: 

Sophie Richter-Devroe is associate professor in the Middle Eastern Studies Department at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha and honorary fellow at the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. Her research interests are in the field of everyday politics and women’s activism in the Middle East. She is the author of Women’s Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018), which won the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize.