Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine.

Author: Dana El Kurd.

Date of publication: 2020.

Publisher: Hurst/Oxford University Press.

No. of pages: 226.

Dana El Kurd’s new book, Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine, examines how international involvement of countries such as the United States has had an impact on how the PA functions as well as the PA’s relationship to society. The book looks at the effect of repression on demobilization in communities characterized by high levels of international involvement. The book employs laboratory experiments, surveys, qualitative analysis, and statistical methods conducted at Birzeit University. El Kurd collected an original nationally representative survey of Palestinian public-opinion, over 50 interviews with decision-makers within the Palestinian Authority, activists, and political leadership, lab-in-field experiments assessing polarization and political behaviour, and an original dataset (+50,000 observations) of daily political mobilization across the territories. El Kurd received her PhD in Government from The University of Texas at Austin in June 2017. She currently works as a researcher at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and as an assistant professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. El Kurd’s research examines how authoritarian regimes try to implement policies and how external intervention may affect their success.