The Endurance of Palestinian Political Factions: An Everyday Perspective from Nahr el-Bared Camp

Perla Issa: is a researcher at the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS) in Beirut. She holds a PhD in Politics from Exeter University, an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, a second MA in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, and a Bachelor degree in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University. Perla Issa runs research trainings and creative writing workshops in the Palestinian camps of Lebanon which culminated in the publication of two collections of short stories in the Arabic language, "11: Ḥikāyāt min al-lujūʾ al-filasṭīnī" (11 Lives: Stories from the Palestinian Exile - currently being translated to English) published by IPS in 2017 and "Ḥub fī al-mukhayyam" (Love in the camp) published by IPS in 2019. Additionally, she co-Directed and co-Produced a six-part independent documentary film series "Chronicles of Refugee" that looks at the global Palestinian refugee experience since 1948.

Ismael Sheikh Hassan: is an urbanist, activist and academic who has engaged in various post-war reconstruction projects and activist initiatives in Palestinian refugee camps and various Lebanese contexts. Ismael was active in the Nahr el Bared Reconstruction commission in 2007 which was a local grass-roots initiative which played a leading role in developing the local community’s reconstruction vision for their camp. He is currently an urban planning advisor to the Camp Improvement Project (CIP) implemented by UNRWA in Palestinian refugee camps. He completed his doctoral dissertation in field of urban planning at KUL university in Leuven, Belgium and  lectures at the Urbanism master’s program at the Lebanese University since 2018. He is also a founding member of the Saida Community Garden (Nohyee el Ard) and of the Lil-Madina Initiative which conducts urban activism and research efforts in Saida.

Hala Abou Zaki: is an anthropologist. She is a fellow at the institute Convergence Migrations and an associated researcher at the Migrations and Society Research Unit (URMIS) in Paris. Her research focus on conflicts and forced migration in the Middle East. She got a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in France. Her doctoral research focused on the social and urban history and the memory of the Lebanese Civil war in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila. In parallel, she worked on spatial and relational reconfiguration of Palestinian refugee families in context of conflicts and migrations. More recently, she collaborated on a research program on the trajectories of young people in education and employment in Lebanon and Jordan as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP/Oxford Brookes University).

Moderated by: Sari Hanafi: American University of Beirut.