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Abstract

Blueprints of the Nation is an ethnography of an emerging form of postnational activism in Israel-Palestine, unfolding at the intersection of urban rights, human rights, and refugee-led organizing. This dissertation examines how Palestinian and Israeli activists, disillusioned with the existing model of politics, adopt alternative means for realizing rights that lie beyond the horizon of the nation-state. Lacking a way of overcoming the impasse of previously negotiated political agreements, such as the defunct Oslo Accords, grassroot activists in Israel-Palestine have turned to different scales of political mobilization. From collaborative architectural projects to community GIS mappings, and insurgent planning efforts, this dissertation focuses on Palestinian and Israeli activists who are working towards a scalable vision of a post-conflict future. In so doing, these nascent movements focus on the spatial and material bedrock from which rights might flourish, embodied in the everyday politics of buildings, roads, buses, closures, walls, and public spaces. Based on 24-months of fieldwork, this dissertation tracks the varied ways in which activists experimented with emerging typologies of politics – ranging from spatial tactics based on counter-mapping depopulated Palestinian villages, to creating digital blueprints for refugees, to rebuild destroyed homes – in order to understand how they work to transform the collective injuries of prolonged dispossession and refugeehood. With this in mind, this dissertation focuses squarely on the emerging nexus of spatial rights and human rights in Israel-Palestine. In doing so, I ask: What are the effects of this scalar shift in moving from the nation-state to the city as a repository of rights? And if part of what is at stake in this move is an attempt to organize collectively outside of a state-based framework, then, through what means can these non-national rights be institutionalized, safeguarded, and sustained? Finally, can a blueprint of collective rights that was drawn under condition of occupation and territorial dispossession provide the material substrate for building towards a “post-Nakba” landscape in Israel-Palestine?

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