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Please note that both the time and format of this event have changed. The guest speaker will join via Zoom rather than in person. The in-person audience will watch the event from EC123, while online attendees can join via Zoom.

Following the Oslo Accords of 1993 Palestinian political factions in Lebanon found their popularity dwindle. Refugees felt betrayed and abandoned by their political leadership who shifted focus and funding from the Palestinians in exile to those in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian camps in Lebanon experienced a period of mismanagement and open criticism of the Palestinian factions became rampant. Considering this, how can we understand the persistence of the factions in monopolizing political representation in Lebanon? How do factions, which are widely and openly criticized, reproduce in everyday life?

In this talk, Perla Issa will discuss her book The Endurance of Palestinian Political Factions: An Everyday Perspective from Nahr el-Bared Camp. Through an examination of the daily, mundane practices of refugees in Nahr el-Bared camp in particular, this book shows how intimate, interpersonal, and kin-based relations are transformed into political networks and offers a fresh analysis of how those networks are in turn metamorphosed into political structures. By providing a detailed and intimate account of this process, this book reveals how factions are produced and reproduced in everyday life despite widespread condemnation.

Perla Issa is a senior research fellow 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. She is the author of The Endurance of Palestinian Political Factions: An Everyday perspective from Nahr el-Bared Camp (University of California Press, 2021). Perla Issa also 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 published by IPS in 2017, translated to English as 11 lives: Stories from Palestinian Exiles (OR Books, 2022) 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.