Short Abstract

This panel explores Gaza’s economy under siege, examining how conflict, blockade, and aid dependence reshape livelihoods, markets, and agency - challenging conventional notions of development, resilience, and justice through rigorous quantitative and mixed-method research.

Description

This panel will bring together economists and development studies scholars to examine Gaza as one of the starkest cases of economic de-development in the modern world. It will explore how markets, livelihoods, and individual agency survive under prolonged siege, and what this means for the very language and logic of development studies.

The Panel will ask for paper submissions that employ quantitative and mixed-method evidence from household surveys, trade and labour data, and satellite-based measures of destruction. Papers will be given priority that interrogate how conflict, blockade, and occupation have reshaped Gaza’s labour markets, production systems, and social structures. The discussion will address not only the economic costs of isolation but also the adaptive strategies, informal economies, and solidarities that sustain life and dignity under extreme constraint.

By situating Gaza within broader debates on decolonising development and redistributing power, the panel will ask whether traditional tools of economics and development studies can meaningfully capture resilience, justice, and wellbeing in such contexts. It calls for a more humane and reflexive economics and development studies — one that confronts structural violence, engages with ethics as part of empirical analysis, and reimagines the boundaries of “development” when normality itself is denied.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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