Suche

is completing her PhD at the University of Maryland/College Park in the Department of Government and Politics with a dissertation titled: Aggression of Inclusion: the Effect of Decentralized Leadership and Informal Politics in the Palestinian Authority on Inter-factional Violence in a Colonial Context. She received her B.A. from Birzeit University, Ramallah, her M.A. from the University of Maryland/College Park. Her main field of study is comparative politics with a concentration on the relationship between social movements and the state apparatus (especially the repression-dissent nexus), the transition and/or robustness of authoritarian regimes, and the political thought of Islamist social movements. She conducted her fieldwork in the Occupied Territories in 2007. At the time she also held the position of Acting Director of the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) in Ramallah. In her dissertation she attempts to move beyond the liberal understanding of inclusion that locates violence (or moderation) within social Islamist movements in the context of the Middle East, and to situate it within the context of state-movement interaction, colonization, and high foreign intervention. In doing so, she also sheds light on the ideas of the Islamist movement Hamas with regard to governance and internal violence and how they evolve and interact with the liberal project of politics.