Life Lived in Relief : Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics

Palestinian refugees’ experience of displacement is among the lengthiest in history. __Life Lived in Relief__ explores this community’s engagement with humanitarian assistance over a seventy-year period and their persistent efforts over this long time span to alter their present and future conditions. Even as humanitarian intervention is conceived as crisis-driven and focused on survival, protracted displacement is a common circumstance, necessitating long-term humanitarian presence. The book describes the operational challenges of oscillating between chronic conditions and repeating emergency situations as “punctuated humanitarianism.” Punctuated humanitarianism also means that people move through different relationships with the humanitarian apparatus. Palestinian refugee politics is buffeted between near and far futures, close and distant geographies, and immediate needs and existential claims. This politics is expressed not only in the register of suffering but also as aspiration, existence, and refusal. These multiplicities are often discordant, but they persist together. The “politics of living” in and against humanitarianism is central to what it has meant to be Palestinian since 1948. It also provides new insights into the possibilities of political life in precarious conditions. The story of Palestinians and humanitarianism is illustrative of life and relief in the many circumstances of protracted displacement across the globe. Palestinian refugees’ experience of protracted displacement is among the lengthiest in history. In her breathtaking new book, Ilana Feldman explores this community’s engagement with humanitarian assistance over a seventy-year period and their persistent efforts to alter their present and future conditions. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic field research, Life Lived in Relief offers a comprehensive account of the Palestinian refugee experience living with humanitarian assistance in many spaces and across multiple generations. By exploring the complex world constituted through humanitarianism, and how that world is experienced by the many people who inhabit it, Feldman asks pressing questions about what it means for a temporary status to become chronic. How do people in these conditions assert the value of their lives? What does the Palestinian situation tell us about the world? Life Lived in Relief is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and practice of humanitarianism today.  
"Palestinian refugees' experience of protracted displacement is among the lengthiest in history. In her breathtaking new book, Ilana Feldman explores this community's engagement with humanitarian assistance over a seventy-year period and their persistent efforts to alter their present and future conditions. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic field research, Life Lived in Relief offers a comprehensive account of the Palestinian refugee experience living with humanitarian assistance in many spaces and across multiple generations. By exploring the complex world constituted through humanitarianism, and how that world is experienced by the many people who inhabit it, Feldman asks pressing questions about what it means for a temporary status to become chronic. How do people in these conditions assert the value of their lives? What does the Palestinian situation tell us about the world? Life Lived in Relief is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and practice of humanitarianism today"--Provided by publisher