Palestine in Westphalian Worldmaking: The Production of the OPT as a Place through International Humanitarian-Developmental Governance

This multiple manuscript dissertation examines the international governance of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT)—a non-sovereign territory— undertaken by an assemblage of actors doing both humanitarian and development work. The study puts forward the theoretical and methodological framework of place-making to analyze the effects of the long-term governance of the OPT under the umbrella of humanitarian service provision and external ‘state-building’ development interventions. This dissertation argues that the long-term international governance of the OPT, even though mandated to be apolitical, acts as an interpellator of place. The production of place or place-making through the overlapping discourses of humanitarianism and sustainable development situates the OPT as part of the Westphalian system where otherwise it exists outside sovereignty and the attendant protection of human rights. Place-making is an effect rather than an intended policy. Nonetheless, it is an important by-product of international governance as it highlights how governance actors as agents of the Westphalian structure are limited by the constraints placed on them but also counter these by mobilizing the more universal (and less contentious) policies and frameworks to advocate for deeply political issues. The dissertation analyzes the use of the Sustainable Development Framework in the policy literature of UN agencies and other development actors working in the OPT as a heuristic of place-making. The use of the SDG language in policy documents since 2015 illustrate a blending of the conventionally siloed humanitarian and developmental aspects of intervention. Instead of a technical assessment of the SDG implementation, the dissertation focuses on the implications this has on solving the problem of invisibility faced by the stateless Palestinian population of the OPT. By mobilizing the SDGs, international governance positions this population as valuable lives deserving of rights just like other ‘full citizens.’ In assessing the relevance of the SDGs through the lens of place-making, the dissertation illustrates the management of the long interim of the transition of OPT. In the absence of sovereignty, frameworks like the SDGs help to underline the inherent deservingness of the Palestinian population in the OPT and hence acts, as it were, a discourse of inclusion. Further, the dissertation highlights that while the SDGs help to visiblize the OPT, the goals are also used in the foreign donor led state-building interventions through which the infrastructure of Palestinian statehood is funded by countries like Canada, even as its realization is interminably deferred through their foreign policy actions. This reveals a reinforcement of statist place-making onto the OPT, disregarding the structural conditions that disallow it. These arguments have implications for how we understand statelessness as more than absence of legal identity, the use of global public policies in the context of entrenched statelessness and the political horizons and futurity of the OPT in the Westphalian system.

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