Security, cooptation and resistance: peacebuilding-as-fragmentation in the occupied Palestinian Territory

It is often assumed that the Palestinian case does not ‘fit’ as an example of a liberal peacebuilding project, and that the centrality of US unconditional support for Israel has allowed realist politics to dominate – thus creating, at best, a peacebuilding agenda tailored to the security needs of Israel not to the needs of Palestinians, or, at worst, a faux peacebuilding project masking a process of colonization.1 However, liberal peacebuilding does not take one form, nor is it an abstract discourse, implemented in isolation from the cut and thrust of international and regional politics, but it interacts with both the context and the resistances it experiences to create a unique hybridity.2 As stated by Mitchell and Richmond in this volume, ‘the manner in which a particular peace intervention is realized on the ground depends to a great extent on the dynamics of hybridization, which takes place along the shared interface between the local and the international on the one hand, and, on the other, the everyday practices and interactions which open up this space’.