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List of Illustrations 1. Palestinian flags, traditional and Islamized, alongside United States flag 2 2. Palestinian flag featuring a stencil of the Dome of the Rock; United States flag in background 3 3. Demonstrator wearing the national colors and kufiya scarf over hijab 4 4. Map of British Mandate for Palestine, 1922-1948 10 5. Chicago Community Areas Map 36 6. Palestinian Dabka 43xiii Foreword by the Series Editor "The Palestinians" are a household word and the Palestinian condition is routinely invoked as emblematic of the dark side of the modern world: settler colonial violence, racialization and statelessness, disenfranchisement and incarceration, inequality and over-exposure to the disasters of climate change. Palestinian resistance, by the same token, is inspirational because of its persistent multigenerational struggles for justice, dignity, and the right to exist as a political community in the face of asymmetrical power relations. It is precisely because of this over-determined binary that tomes on the Palestinian-Israeli "conflict, " most of which are dominated by "one land/two people" nationalist constructions of the past, still rule the shelves. Fortunately, the past two decades have witnessed a flowering of scholarship that exceeds the colonial and nationalist frames through grounded studies of the internal complexities and lived experiences of Palestinian communities. They look at the world with Palestinian eyes. Their lines of vision intersect with the stories of many of the world's marginalized and disenfranchised populations. New Directions in Palestinian Studies (NDPS), the first book series of its kind in the United States, publishes books that put Palestinians at the center of research projects, to decolonize and globalize knowledge production about the Palestinian condition.The fundamental Palestinian condition is one of ongoing process of dispossession, displacement, and statelessness, coupled with grinding generational struggles for survival across an extraordinarily diverse range of political, social, and cultural geographies. A shared trauma-the ethnic cleansing of the overwhelming majority of Palestinians from their native land in 1948-is, at one and the same time, the key reference point for the Palestinian political imagination and a centrifuge xiv Foreword by the Series Editor of life trajectories. The epicenter remains pre-1948 Palestine, where roughly half of the twelve million Palestinians still live; they do so under a bewilderingly complex array of differential legal, military, and economic zones and rules of mobility meant to fragment and contain their communities. A large percentage of them, moreover, live not in their ancestral homes and villages, but in refugee camps, urban neighborhoods, and unrecognized villages in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel. The other six million or so Palestinians, most of whom live within driving distance of pre-1948 Palestine, constitute the oldest refugee population in the world, and also one of the largest.The focus on Palestin...

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In dominant global conceptions of conflict-related sexual violence, the experiences of male survivors, if attended to at all, have thus far almost exclusively been analysed in terms of vulnerabilities. Drawing on empirical evidence from two different cases (Uganda and Croatia), in this article we argue that essentializing and static generalizations of ‘emasculation’ fail to do justice to the complexity of male survivors’ experiences. We show that, in the two cases we examine, male survivors exercise agency and find different ways of engaging with their harmful experiences. Survivors’ agency is shaped and conditioned by different opportunity structures, and thus largely dependent on local gender relations and constructions of masculinity. To build our argument, we take inspiration from feminist international relations scholarship highlighting the active roles of women and girls as agents within the context of armed conflict, extending such analysis to the experiences of male survivors of sexual violence. By systematically analysing the forms and conditions of the agency of male survivors of sexual violence, we offer a more holistic examination of the dynamics of wartime sexual violence, contributing conceptually and empirically to research both on local/civilian agency in wartime and on conflict-related sexual violence.

In this article we argue that prevalent explanatory frameworks of sexual violence against men primarily pursue one line of inquiry, explaining its occurrence as exclusively strategic and systematic, based on heteronormative and homophobic assumptions about violence, gender and sexualities. Feminist IR scholarship has significantly complexified our understanding of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), documenting its multiple forms and causes across time and space—thereby moving beyond the persistent opportunism-strategy dichotomy and critically engaging with the dominant ‘rape as a weapon of war’ narrative. Drawing on empirical material from Sri Lanka and northern Uganda we queer the current explanatory frameworks, analyzing multiple instances of CRSV against men that both simultaneously seem to confirm and defy categorizations as opportunistic or strategic, while being situated in broader and systematic warfare dynamics and unequal power-relationships. Our empirical material shows that relying on crude categorizations such as the opportunism–strategy binary is unproductive and essentialist, as it tends to mask over the complexities and messiness of deeply gendered power relationships during times of war. Binary strategy/opportunism categorizations also imply broader unintended political consequences, including the further marginalization of sexual violence acts that fall outside the dominant scripts or binary frameworks—such as sexual violence against men with opportunistic underpinnings.