[selected academic articles, chapters, etc.]

Uneven Borders, Colored (Im)mobilities: ID Cards in Palestine/Israel
Tawil-Souri, H. Geopolitics 17(2) forthcoming 2012
abstract: The Israeli state apparatus mandates differentiated IDs to Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinian non-citizens in East Jerusalem, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Thebureaucracy of Palestinian IDcards since 1948 has rendered Palestinians more legible for the security interests of Israel while simultaneously discriminating Palestinians from Jews as unequal citizens and non-citizens. The ID card regime, and less so the permit regime, limits Palestinian geographic movement and economic mobilitywhile simultaneouslypermits freer Jewish-Israeli flows and mobilities. ID cards demonstrate the power of the Israeli regime to produce distinct people and bind them to specific territories (such as the Palestinians), while allowing others (Jewish-Israelis) to ‘trespass’ over those same boundaries. Through ID cards borders are erected between Jewish and Arab people, not Israeli and Palestinian territory. The ID card regime puts into question the nature and territorial boundaries of ‘Israel’, and the geopolitical existence of the ‘Palestinian Territories.’

The ‘War on Terror’ in Arab Media
Tawil-Souri, H. In Daya Thussu and Des Freedman (Eds.), Media and Terrorism: Global Perspectives (241-254). Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2012
chapter abstract: How do the 300 million people in the Arab world view the ‘war on terror’? In her contribution, Helga Tawil-Souri contests the notion of the Arab world as a homogeneous entity or assumptions about the existence of a unified Arab media voice. Instead, she contends, there are a range of Arab media voices, given the diversity of Arab nations, in terms of their histories, levels of socio-economic development, media systems and potential for democratization. Tawil-Souri strongly argues that there are competing Arab and Islamic visions on the war on terror and on the concept of jihad itself. She notes that the war on terror has been used by Arab governments to suppress oppositional voices – whether Islamic, Islamist or jihadist. Dismissing the claim that there is such a thing as a ‘global jihad’, she argues that the primary targets of Islamists are not the West but Arab governments, which are seen as not practising Islamic conduct. She also debunks the myth about the power and popularity of online ‘jihadist media’ in the Arab landscape, arguing that broadcasting is the most popular form of media production and consumption, especially pan-Arab satellite channels.

Where is the Political in Cultural Studies? In Palestine [link]
Tawil-Souri, H. International Journal of Cultural Studies 16(1): 1-16, 2012
abstract: By drawing on scholarship that focuses on cinema and music, the author argues that the very act of ‘creating culture’ in the contemporary Palestinian period is a form of political resistance. Second, given political conditions of countering Zionist/Israeli erasures, the study of Palestinian culture is also a form of political resistance. The author argues that the resistance at the heart of the two ‘analytics’ of culture and cultural studies is imperative.

Digital Occupation: The High-Tech Enclosure of Gaza
Tawil-Souri, H. Journal of Palestine Studies 41(1) (in press / Fall 2011)
abstract: Israeli control of Gaza purportedly occurs through “frictionless” means of high-tech mechanisms. But the high-tech infrastructure used by Gazans is also a space of control. By analyzing Israeli-imposed limitations over Palestinian land-lines, cellular telephone and internet infrastructures, this article argues that Gazans live under a regime of digital occupation. Digital occupation enforces continued Palestinian economic reliance on Israel and relegates Palestinian high-tech firms as dependent agents of Israeli control. The article further argues that territorial and technological mechanisms are central to Israel’s spatial containment of Gaza.

Colored Identity : The Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine/Israel [link]
Tawil-Souri, H. Social Text 107: 67-97. Summer 2011
abstract: In Palestine/Israel, different colored identification cards are mandated by the Israeli state apparatus to Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and those who are citizens of Israel. The article traces the development of the bureaucracy of the Palestinian ID card since the establishment of Israel and suggests that modern-day ID cards in Palestine/Israel are physical and visible instruments of a widespread low-tech surveillance mechanism to control mobility and a principal means for discriminating, both positively and negatively, subjects' privileges and rights. ID cards are both the spaces in which Palestinians confront, tolerate, and sometimes challenge the Israeli state, and a mechanism through which Palestinian spatiality, territoriality, and corporeality are penetrated by the Israeli regime. Vital in the control and differentiation of Palestinian populations, what makes ID cards unique in the Palestinian/Israeli case is that their materiality is one of their most important and resonant aspects. The article describes various representations of the ID cards, for example in poetry and in murals, to show how they also function as sites of remediation, spaces and moments of renegotiation for their bearers, subject to counter-hegemonic representations, interpretations, and uses. As a special kind of material object, ID cards are an effective and low-tech means of surveillance and differentiation and an important nexus of Israeli power, demonstrating the institutional materiality of the state apparatus's constitution in subjects' everyday life; but they have also become important because they allow a poetics of political resistance.

A Space Exodus: A Truly Palestinian Film (Larissa Sansour, dir.) [link]
Tawil-Souri, H. Film Review in Jadaliyya. Summer 2011

Qalandia: An Autopsy [link]
Tawil-Souri, H. Jerusalem Quarterly 45, Summer 2011

The Hi-Tech Enclosure of Gaza [link]
Tawil-Souri, H. in Mahrene Larudee (Ed.), Gaza: Out of the Margins (30-52). Ramallah: Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute, February 2011
abstract: Tawil-Souri’s key question is how to use the concept and practice of enclosure in comparative terms, and how this practice, discourse and concept function. In this regard she analyzes the role of the Israeli state regime/apparatus in relation to other spatial ‘players’ or ‘forces,’ and issues such as globalization, migration, neo-liberalism, as well as legal, economic, and demographic changes at the expense of Palestinians and specifically Gazans. She adds that digitally, enclosure takes place thanks to the privatization of knowledge and information, while digital enclosure raises the issues of asymmetrical access to information resources, databases, and processing power. She gives several examples of the digital enclosure of Gaza, including among others telecommunications, internet and television.

Qalandia Checkpoint as Space and Non-Place [link]
Tawil-Souri, H. Space and Culture 14(1), Winter 2011: 4-26
abstract: This article analyzes checkpoints in the Palestinian Territories and how they function as both a unique anthropological space and a nondescript nonplace. First, the author describes the birth of modern-day checkpoints, their formations, variations, and functions. Then, based on ethnographic research at the Qalandia checkpoint, halfway between Ramallah and Jerusalem, the author shows how the checkpoint is an economic and social hub and argues that it is an “anthropological space.” Qalandia and checkpoints generally can also be theorized as “nonplaces,” akin to airports, that are interstitial zones that sever Palestinian space-time. Finally, the author suggests that checkpoints play a central and symbolic role in Palestinian society that bespeaks the core predicament of Palestinian existence within a paradoxical and disordered relationship to geography over which Israel continuously attempts to exert control.

A Tale of Love and Darkness (Amos Oz)
Tawil-Souri, H. Review in Middle East Journal of Culture and Communications 4(2), 279-282, 2011.

Orange, Green, and Blue: Colour-Coded Paperwork for Palestinian Population Control [link]
Tawil-Souri, H. In Elia Zureik, David Lyon, and Yasmeen Abu-Laban (Eds.), Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory, and Power (219-238). London: Routledge, 2011.

Footnotes in Gaza (Joe Sacco)
Tawil-Souri, H. Review in Middle East Journal of Culture and Communications 3(2): 113-116, 2011.

Qalandia Checkpoint: The Historical Geography of a Non-Place [link]
Tawil-Souri, H. in Jerusalem Quarterly 42, Summer 2010.

Walking Nicosia, Imagining Jerusalem [link]
Tawil-Souri, H. in Re-Public: Re-Imagining Democracy, Special Issue on Cities in Turmoil, August 2010.

Palestinian/Israeli Cinema (various entries) [link]
Tawil-Souri, H. Historical Dictionary of Middle East Cinema, Eds. Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard, 2010.

Towards a Palestinian Cultural Studies [link to pdf]
Tawil-Souri, H. Guest Editor, Special Issue of Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 2(2) October 2009

The IDF’s YouTube Channel During the 2009 Gaza War [link]
Tawil-Souri, H. In MediaRes, “Media and Conflict”, March-April 2009

The Political Battlefield of pro-Arab Videogames [link]
Tawil-Souri, H. in War Isn’t Hell, It’s Entertainment: Essays on Visual Media and the Representation of Conflict
Edited by Rikke Schubart et al. 2009

New Palestinian Centers: An Ethnography of the ‘Checkpoint Economy’ [link]
Tawil-Souri, H. International Journal of Cultural Studies 12(3): 217-235, Spring 2009
abstract: Based on an ethnography of Palestinian checkpoint workers, the author suggests that new and emerging ‘checkpoint economies’ are transforming politically contested boundaries into important economic centers. Focusing on taxi drivers, porters, merchants and peddlers at the West Bank’s Qalandia checkpoint, halfway between Jerusalem and Ramallah, the article tracks the growth of checkpoints and their ad hoc economy, and of Qalandia specifically, and argues that although checkpoints are technologies of Israeli military control, they are also renegotiated spaces of resistance.

Arab Television in Academic Scholarship [link]
Tawil-Souri, H. Sociology COMPASS 2: 1400-1415, August 2008
abstract: Over the past 10 years, there has been an exponential increase in satellite television in the Arab world, with programming ranging from music videos to news, from reality TV programs to Islamic talk shows. Concurrent with this development has been the growth of academic scholarship on understanding the relationship between Arab television and social and political transformations in the Middle East. This article provides an overview of Arab television growth, especially that of pan-Arab satellite channels such as Al-Jazeera, and of scholarship about it. Academic work that focuses on theories of media globalization and the public sphere, and that is in conversation with Western journalism and global media studies, is highlighted.

Arab Media and Political Renewal (Naomi Sakr, ed.) [link]
Tawil-Souri, H. Review in Particip@tions: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 5 (1), May 2008

Americanizing Palestine Through Internet Development [link]
Tawil Souri, H., in Internationalizing Internet Studies, Eds. Gerard Goggin and Mark McLelland. 2008

The Political Battlefield of pro-Arab Videogames on Palestinian Streets [link]
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27(3):536-551, November 2007. Special Issue of Mediated Politics in the Middle East

Global and National Forces for a Nation-State Yet to be Born: The Paradoxes of Palestinian Television Policies [link]
Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 4(3):4-25, September 2007
abstract: Tracing the history of Palestinian television industry from its birth in 1993 to the mid-2000’s, this paper analyzes changing television policies and discusses the influences of the Palestinian Authority and Israel in hijacking media policy for their own political purposes. Palestinian broadcasting regulations have been caught in a bind: reflecting the geographic, political and economic conditions of the Territories – fragmented, isolated and in a state of arrested development; and, responding to regional cultural changes, such as the rise of pan-Arab satellite television, and political challenges stemming from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Move over Bangalore, here comes... Palestine? Western Funding and 'Internet Development' in the Shrinking Palestinian State [link]
Tawil Souri, H. in Global Communications: Towards a Transcultural Political Economy, Eds. Paula Chakravartty and Yuezhi Zhao, 2007: 263-284.
volume description: This provocative book takes a new approach toward understanding the uneven flows of global communications. Rather than guiding its discussion by geography, types of media, or traditional separations of power and resistance, Global Communications examines political economic power and communication in relation to historically specific encounters with modernity. It underscores lived experiences in its approach to globalization showing that the state and the market can both be sites of empowerment, just as civil society might also be a site of repression. Taking a political-economic analysis of communication and culture, this dynamic group of international authors looks beyond developments in the North American information and culture industries to map new forms of citizenship and exclusion. The chapters spotlight China, Ghana, India, Japan, Palestine, Russia, Singapore, and Venezuela, and foreground the transnational formations of the European Union, the pan-Arab and Spanish-speaking markets, and civil society actors in sub-Saharan African, the Middle East, and North America. Theoretically driven and empirically grounded, Global Communications defines communication broadly to include production, circulation, and consumption and addresses urgent questions about the inequalities of globalization and the possibilities of hybrid cultural forms and practices.

Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular Culture (Ted Swedenburg and Rebecca Stein, eds.)
Tawil-Souri, H. Review in Journal of Palestine Studies 36(1): 92-93. Autumn 2006.

Marginalizing Palestinian Development: Lessons against peace. [link]
Souri, H. T, Development 49(2): 75-80, Spring 2006
abstract: Helga Tawil Souri argues that since 1993 American development projects in the Palestinian territories have focused on ‘peace-building’. Tawil Souri underlines that peace-oriented American funding has not strengthened the Palestinian economy but marginalized indigenous civic institutions, resulting in further impoverishment of Palestinians and the continuation of a political conflict invoked as a reason for global terrorism. The failures of American development projects in the Palestinian Territories have resulted in further justifying violence against the US.

Women and Media in the Middle East (Naomi Sakr, ed.)
Tawil-Souri, H. Review in Global Media and Communication 2(1): 111-114. April 2006.

Like Twenty Impossibles (Annemarie Jacir, dir.)
Tawil-Souri, H. Review in Visual Anthropology Review 21(1): 164-166. March 2006.

Coming Into Being and Flowing Into Exile: History and Trends in Palestinian Film-Making. [link]
Tawil, H. Nebula 2(2): 113-140, June 2005

[selected non-academic writings]

Occupy Wall Street to Global Intifada
Al Jazeera [op-ed / 2011] [link]

them/us. me/you. palestinian/israeli.
Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America 12, 57-58 [poetry / 2011]

Reports from the West Bank
for Mariborski RadioMars, Maribor, Slovenia [news reports / 2005] [link]