| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
It was as a precursor to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in May 1994, when the prospect of state-building entered the political horizon, that the concept of "civil society" became part of the research discourse in Palestine. Questions were posed about economic issues, the proposed structure of the national authority and the feasibility of building a democratic state out of an occupied land. Many feared that the new authority would lean toward authoritarianism rather than democracy - and therefore hoped to find in civil society both a balance for the power of the state and a means of redistributing power. They hoped that civil society would indeed turn out to be, in the words of Palestinian academic George Giacaman, "that societal sphere, in which the individual plays the role of a social actor through the society organizations and in relative separation from the state" (Giacaman, 1995, p.108). This article will consider what it means to discuss Palestinian civil society, trace its historical development, and review the challenges it has faced since 2007 after the political division of the West Bank and Gaza.
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