New Books In Critical Theory

Dr. Sophie Richter-Devroe’s book, Women’s Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival (University of Illinois Press, 2018) offers an analysis of the forms assumed by women’s political resistance in Occupied Palestine and interrogates how an understanding of such activism might be expanded if one attends to the ‘everyday’. During the last twenty years, Palestinian women have practiced creative and, often, informal everyday forms of political activism. Building upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork, including several in-depth interviews and extended participant-observation, Dr. Richter-Devroe reflects on their struggles to bring about social and political change. In doing so, she presents a two-pronged critique of liberal notions of ‘the political’ as well as of mainstream conflict resolution methods–specifically the failed woman-to-woman peacebuilding projects so lauded around the world–which collapse in a context such as Palestine, characterized by ever-intensifying Israeli occupa