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Studies 11 April, 2012

Re-reading the Myth of Fayyadism: A Critical Analysis of the Palestinian Authority’s Reform and State-building Agenda, 2008-2011

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Philip Leech

Philip Leech is a PhD student at the Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. Before starting at Exeter, he graduated with > distinction from a Master of Arts programme at Lancaster University's Richardson Institute for Peace Studies. His previous research work has been into the role of youth in resistance in the West Bank. For this this he undertook two and half months of field work based at Birzeit University near Ramallah. His areas of concern include a wide range of approaches to conflict analysis and conflict transformation. In particular, gender analysis, political economy and ethnopolitics, factionalism and gender in the occupied territories

Abstract

acrobat Icon Fayyadism is a term coined by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman that has gained widespread usage in the media and the quasi-academic literature emanating from various high-profile English-language think tanks. The term is named after the current prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Dr. Salam Fayyad, formally an economist at the IMF, and is used to describe the raft of political and economic reforms that have been central to the PA's state-building agenda. Supporters of this agenda from all sides have promoted it in orientalist terms (i.e., as a reasonable method for Palestinians to achieve their national goals), in contrast to uncivilized armed resistance and/or Islamism. This paper argues that Fayyadism does not, in fact, constitute a radical new approach to ending the occupation or liberating Palestinians. Rather, Palestinian agency remains contingent on the same basic dynamics as it has since the beginning of the Oslo process. If Fayyadism has had any effect at all on this arrangement of power, it has been to entrench the occupation rather than to end it.

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*This study forms the Introduction to a book which will be published by the ACRPS in full in the future